Forever Hold Your Peace: Let Her Speak Now and…
TITLE: Forever Hold Your Peace (Živi i zdravi) / DIRECTOR AND SCREENWRITER: Ivan Marinović / CAST: Tihana Lazović, Goran Slavić, Momčilo Momo Pićurić, Goran Bogdan, Snježana Sinovčić Šiškov… / DURATION: 96’ / COUNTRY: Montenegro, Serbia, Czech Republic, Croatia, North Macedonia, Slovenia / YEAR: 2023
Forever Hold Your Peace, which premiered last year at Tallin Black Nights Film Festival is Ivan Marinović’s second feature film. While his first feature, The Black Pin (2016), thematized death, Forever Hold Your Peace focuses on a wedding, the second of three key events in a person’s life according to traditional Balkan beliefs (birth, wedding, death). (One cannot help but wonder whether Marinović will complete this potential trilogy—and thus the “circle of life”—with a birth-related film.)
The wedding, as a central part of someone’s life according to customs, is completely decentralized in this film: at the outset, the bride Dragana (Tihana Lazović) gives up on marrying her fiancé Momo (Goran Slavić). A woman’s refusal is unacceptable in small Montenegrin communities, all the more when placed in the context of a rural wedding. This refusal was intelligently recognized by the director as a plot catalyst. Indeed, out of that same refusal naturally arise gender and social differences, painting a picture of a society presented as a parade of forced patriarchy whose absolute leader is the groom’s father, Leso (Momčilo Momo Pićurić). Marinović chooses Leso as the central figure already within the first shots which show Leso finding a floating mine from which he later makes dynamite for the wedding. This clever prologue allows the director to subtly address the history of the war-torn Balkans, the masculine gun obsession, as well as the traditional celebratory gunfire, taken to extremes for comic purposes.
Indeed, it is the dynamite’s wick that will dictate the pace of the film, along with a pervasive tension concealed in the tacit agreement between the bride and groom – to go on with the wedding, but to separate afterward. Neither the desperate Dragana nor the confused Momo are satisfied with this forced solution, causing the bride to jump off the terrace and the groom to get drunk, for the sake of fulfilling the imposed obligations. However, once their secret agreement is revealed, a long-awaited disapproval from both their families explodes, resulting in scenes such as the one where Dragana is dragged by her family members, in her wedding dress and heels, to get go and get married. In many other similar scenes, the director manages to create comic situations out of serious ones by simply showing them on the screen and exaggerating them. This effect is further emphasized by an exceptional choice of music – both the original score by Toni Kitanovski, whose Lanthimos-like plucking of strings highlights the humor, and the pop hits from the Montenegrin duo Who See and the Croatian rapper Vojko V, whose already-established musical personas make us chuckle.
The Montenegrin language and its commonplaces are similarly used for comedic purposes: certain set phrases are all the funnier (to the audiences of the former Yugoslav region) when uttered by a drunken groom. The director also mocks Montenegro’s desire to join the European Union, in a scene in which locals confuse Cape Verde’s flag with the EU flag. However, there is no humor found at all in the position of women in such society; this is something that Marinović persistently tries to portray through Dragana’s character, nonetheless failing to give her enough space to confront the situation she is in. For instance, in a scene in which Dragana takes the camera in her hands, the POV shots suggest that she may successfully rise above the occasion. Later in the film, however, the groom does the same, leading us to believe that the POV was used merely for effect. Other elements also contribute to the clarity and a potential appeal of this film to wider audiences: Dominik Istenič’s predominantly bright yellow- and blue-toned photography along with the centered framing, superficial and flat dialogues (albeit on complex topics), but above all, an “explosive cocktail”: guns, a wedding, alcohol, and subtle feminism.
Still, in the film’s dynamics—where everything falls apart except for the wedding, which relentlessly continues—Marinović’s stance on this uncompromising custom becomes clear. More so than in the original title (literal translation: Alive and Well), this is much more effectively communicated in the English title where the deliberate omission of the “Speak Now” part from the saying “Speak Now, or Forever Hold Your Peace” underlines the centuries-old silencing of women with marriage, suggesting that perhaps the adequate title should have been Let Her Speak Now and Forever Hold Her Peace.
Forever Hold Your Peace film still: Sense Production promo.
