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Love

2006, Movie, NR, 93 mins

Love: Review

Yugoslavian-born writer-producer-director-editor Vladan Nikolic weaves together the intersecting stories of lost souls who bring their international miseries to New York in this cool, cynical thriller. At the film's heart is a morose, rootless hit man who carries a pocket rosary and retains just enough faith to make his job a misery. Abandoned as an infant to an orphanage in the former Yugoslavia, Vanya Nevakovich (Sergej Trifunovic) found a surrogate family in the Yugoslavian army and was cut loose again as his country collapsed into a bitter scrum of warring nations. He met Anna Petrovic (Geno Lechner), the daughter of a Serbian mother and a German father, in Bosnia, where she was working for Doctors Without Borders. Anna eventually fell apart under the pressure of the Balkans' endless, soul-eroding misery and left Vanya for the hope of a new life in New York. She's engaged to a police officer named Dirk Malloy (Peter Gevisser), an aspiring writer who's pressing her for a commitment she's unwilling to make. Vanya's passage to America was paid by a small-time crime lord; he's paying off his debt as a reluctant assassin. Sent to intercept a Colombian drug dealer, Vanya finds him dead of a heart attack in his hotel room. And then who should walk in but Anna, who's been paying a house call on a patient a couple of floors down. Dirk, who dropped her off at the hotel, thinks Anna has been kidnapped and sets out to rescue her despite the assurances of federal agents — who appear suddenly on the scene — that she's safe in the hands of a professional who doesn't kill for fun. Ricocheting around this doomed triangle are a jilted French waitress (Liat Glick), a small-time Neapolitan thug (Mario Padula) devoted to his dying wife, a Slovenian drug dealer-performance artist (Didier Flamand), a lovelorn Lebanese refugee (Al Naz) obsessed with a duplicitous Canadian thrill-seeker (Kerry Rossy) scarred by the legacy of incest, and a depressed Fed from Texas (Eric Frandsen). Style reigns supreme in this accomplished low-budget film, which is both an asset and a liability. Nikolic's gimmicky narrative doubles back on itself, each new version of events expanding on the one before without changing the viewer's fundamental perception of what happened. But Serbian cinematographer Vladimir Subotic's photography transforms New York's outlying neighborhoods and anonymous streets into a weather-beaten dreamscape suffused with mystery, danger and the hope of heaven. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh