A young woman, a born swimmer, backstrokes her way across the Adriatic Sea under a blinding sun in the opening images of “Murina,” now playing in limited theatrical release.
We don’t yet know her circumstances, where she’s from, what kind of life she lives. But by the time director and co-writer Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic returns to these images, we know why the swimmer carves the water like someone tasting real freedom, perhaps for the first time in her 17 thwarted years.
“Murina” is the eye-filling debut feature from the Croatian-born filmmaker now based in New York. The film tells a simple, beat-by-beat story of this teenager, Julija, played by Gracija Filipovic, and a life defined by the Dalmatian region coastline: craggy, forbidding, with cliffs ideal for jumping.
Underwater, her relationship with her father (Leon Lucev) works well enough. Father and daughter dive for moray eels, the “murina” of the title. Above water, the tensions among this family threaten to burst into violence. The father has given up on making his wife behave the way he wants her to. “Murina” is a clear if programmatic narrative of what happens when the child in this dynamic bears the brunt of his disapproval.
Residing on an island, Julija’s father and long-suffering, sun-dappled mother (Danica Curcic) are entertaining a longtime acquaintance who may buy the land and develop it for tourism. The adults share a shadowy history, and when we meet this potential savior, played by Cliff Curtis, he’s plainly a wolfish narcissist and a man of means who means to stir up trouble.
Right away, sheltered, watchful Julija sees this man with the arrogant, charismatic Elia Kazan profile as her ticket out. She’s hyper-aware of how he looks at both her and her mother.
Julija sees a way out for both women in this miserably patriarchal clan, and a way to see the world. The girl dreams of going to school in America. Anywhere but here, she thinks, though she’s effortlessly in tune with her physical surroundings where she is.
“If he gets this,” her mother says of Julija’s father and the land sale, “he’ll be calmer.”
“If he gets money,” the daughter responds, calmly, “he’ll be worse.”
From there, “Murina” explores elements of sunshine noir, and hints of a sinister romantic quadrangle. At heart, though, it follows a tidy course of self-discovery for its protagonist, without an overload of nuance or emotional or even much dramatic complexity.
What the film has is visual authority and an eye for composition. Kusijanovic and her inspired cinematographer, Helene Louvart (”Happy as Lazzaro,” “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” “The Lost Daughter”) have no interest in capturing tourism beauty. The landscape isn’t about prettiness; it’s about toughness, and the accumulating harshness of the human behavior in a story of someone finding her escape hatch.
The filmmaker, who wrote “Murina” with Frank Graziano, worked with Filipovic four years ago in the excellent, heart-rending short film ”Into the Blue.” It’s well worth seeing; there, the barely teenaged friendship of two girls and a caddish boy plays out in ways that feel completely honest and authentic. In “Murina” you sense the filmmaker straining a bit for the same within her story structure. She’s essentially building a case for what’s obvious from the beginning: Julija wants out, because obedience and compliance is no life at all.
Her camera eye, I suspect, will see her through in future projects. Martin Scorsese backed “Murina” as executive producer. Like the film’s spearfishing, eagle-eyed protagonist, who seems most at home in the water, the filmmaker clearly is swimming in the right direction.
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'MURINA'
(In Croatian and Spanish with English subtitles)
3 stars (out of 4)
Not rated (some nudity, violence)
Running time: 1:34
How to watch: Now playing in theaters
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