Blerta Zeqiri | Martesa (The Marriage) / 2017

trying to reclaim his romeo

by Douglas Messerli

 

Blerta Zeqiri and Kreshnik Keka Berisha (screenplay), Blerta Zeqiri (director) Martesa (The Marriage) / 2017

 

Kosovo director Blerta Zeqiri’s feature film The Marriage begins in a terrain where you would never expect a film about young love to enter: on a field where dozens of people wait for the newest arrival delivery of exhumed bodies now some years after the Kosovo War. What arrives are never full body bags, but often just a few bones, found in the diggings and identified through rings and other objects or DNA evidence. Anita (Adriana Matoshi) is still awaiting news on her parents and has asked her fiancé Bekim (Alban Ukaj) to join her on this particular morning, where he discovers what those who grown used to this regimen already know, the wait is endless and nearly meaningless, but it is a necessary act in order to go on with living one’s life.

     No evidence of her parents’ demise arrives on this morning either, and Anita, about to be married to Bekin, declares she wants to move on with her life, to enter a new world of joy and possibility through her love with her husband.

     What the film also hints, however, is that even the lives of survivors are still being altered and effected by this “time before.” In this case, that time “before” appears in her life in the form of Bekim’s old friend Nol (Genc Salihu), who suddenly shows up in the small city where Anita and Bekim live and where Bekim runs a popular bar. Anita takes an immediate liking to Nol and suddenly realizes that he is the now famous Kosovo singer living and performing in Paris, which endears him to her and fascinates her even more. Indeed, the trio, Anita, Bekim, and Nol become fast friends.

     Only the fact that when Bekim goes on a drinking spree with Nol that lasts a couple of days confuses her, particularly at a time when they are busy planning their wedding and redecorating their marital apartment.

     What the film does not immediately reveal—and indeed almost begrudgingly, is even unwilling to admit—and what Anita never fully comprehends, is what the attentive viewer will begin to perceive almost immediately: not only have Bekim and Nol been close friends but were, in fact, gay lovers, Nol returning to claim his man and hopefully restore their love into a full-time relationship. Realizing that his lost lover is about to get married, Nol recognizes the near impossibility of his aspirations, and doesn’t even hide his sense of desolation, which Anita interprets as having to do with a lost female lover, in her imagination a kind of Romeo and Juliet situation, with the woman being perhaps a Serb or someone from another culture.

       Bekim, however, is as suddenly faced with the possibility that Nol will reveal the full truth to his fiancée, particularly at one point when Nol even declares that he has lost his Romeo, Anita laughing at what she believes is a drunken mistake in gender. Later she is easily led to believe that Nol’s lost lover is Bekin’s own now-married sister, Zana (Vjosa Abazi).

      Throughout the film, and sometimes without warning, Zeqiri takes us back and forth in time, showing us, using the very same actors from an earlier period in both their lives, particularly poignant given the quiet late-night encounters of Nol and Bekim who share a bed in a house in which the family dare not make noise, show their lights, or even go outside of for fear of being killed or arrested.

       Nol’s return, in short, causes chaos in Bekim’s life, at one point a fight over his late-night partying with Nol which threatens to end his and Anita’s relationship. As the marriage date comes closer and closer, Bekim demonstrates his utter confusion of what to do about events, his feelings alternating between total anger for Nol’s refusal to except the vast changes that have seemingly occurred in his life and between his real love for Nol, evidence in itself that all the sexual changes he has artfully created in his world have been superficial, that despite his intense desire for “normative heterosexuality” he is, at heart, as Nol states, still a “faggot”—in a culture, moreover, where being gay can still mean imprisonment and death in the hands of homophobic locals.

       The extremes are notable and, at times, utterly confusing. At one point a group of LGBT activists come to Bekim’s bar, having lost their previous venue, hoping desperately that they might rent out his place for the night for a closed-door meeting. When Bekim hears that it is to be for an LGBT meeting, he absolutely rejects them as any local homophobe might.

       Shortly after, however, when Nol is beaten by homophobic thugs on the street, Bekim comes to his rescue, returning with him to his apartment to nurse his wounds and have sex, and in the process almost committing to a permanent relationship with him—that is until Anita calls and reminds him of manufactured reality he has created. Their sex encounter, however, reveals a passion that we never see Bekim expressing to his future wife.

       Nol now realizes that their love is a lost cause, comprehending what men like Bekim never do until much later: that the lies they live will eventually come to haunt their marriages, torturing themselves, their wives, and their children.

       Such cowardly men, who lie to themselves regarding their sexuality, are to be found in any culture, and there are certainly hundreds of such examples in US films about men who finally, tired of their lies or unable to control their sexual impulses are forced to come to terms with the truth, devastating their families. But it appears that particularly in the radically transformed worlds of the former Yugoslavia, Albania, and Croatia, where everything might be said to have happened too fast to permit long-lingering hates, political tensions, and social mores to readjust, gay sexuality has also been an issue still to be fully resolved. One might take a look at the excellent Montenegrin film Ječam žela (Barley) (2021) as another example.

       What doesn’t quite make sense in the case of The Marriage, however, is that Nol chooses to attend their wedding, uninvited and completely drunken. We keep waiting for—perhaps even hoping for—some sort of outburst, a blazing emblem of truth to be tossed into the sham the false ceremonies. But it never comes. It is as if Nol is there only as a blatant visual testimony to Bekim’s own self-delusional reality. Only near the end does Nol whisper the truth so that a couple of attendees hear of their relationship.

      Yet when Nol attempts to leave the restaurant and walk the long distance back home, Bekim’s insistence that he drive him turns to near-disaster as they speed past a police barricade, nearly hitting a policeman, and are arrested. Finally brought back to the wedding by the police for confirmation of what he has been trying to tell them, Bekim is reunited with a startled and perhaps somewhat wiser or perhaps even more confused Anita.

       Yet the very next day, Bekim is still willing to endanger his new life by demanding he take Nol to the airport. Nol refuses, flagging down a taxi instead, but Bekim shows up to the airport simply to hug his previous lover / now former friend goodbye. We can only imagine the wild range of emotions going through his head as Bekim drives back into what he believes is the surety and safety of societal normality. What he has failed to recognize is that his world is not a normal society, that even his own family have lied to the new bride in order to protect her, her parents’ body parts having now been exhumed without their bothering to tell her, hoping to wait until “after the honeymoon.”

      In a society still built on lies, on its refusal to fully deal with the past, is it any wonder that Bekim remains such a coward? The trouble is that eventually the past returns with a revenge for those who will not or cannot contend with it, either repeating itself or revealing its buried truths with disastrous results.

      This truly important movie appears to have come and gone without its fair share of critical attention. Although it may be almost lugubrious in its storytelling, the story it tells, all too common for gay or bisexual men unwilling to explore their own sexual feelings and who chose heteronormative life not as a full thought-out decision but simply as a default in turn for never having to explore themselves or even growing into fully mature adults, should be required viewing for young men about to marry who feel themselves torn between sexual desires. The film was entered by Kosovo for the Best Foreign Language Film for 91st Academy Awards, but was not nominated as a finalist by the committee.

 

Los Angeles, October 25, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).