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).
