CURRENTS

TAKE ME SOMEWHERE NICE ENA SENDIJAREVIC

ITH AN ACUTE SENSE OF CULTURAL AND GENERATIONAL DYNAMICS, ENA SENDIJAREVIC’S debut feature puts a fresh spin on the coming-of-age movie. Introduced through a prism of reflections in a mirrored dressing room, the film’s teenage protagonist, Alma (played with ingratiating moxie by newcomer Sara Luna Zoric), is a young woman of many conflicting impulses and identities. Idling away her summer in the Netherlands with her mother, the Bosnian-bred Alma seems happy if not satisfied with her situation; when word arrives that her estranged father is in the hospital, she decides to visit him in the Balkans. With the reluctant help of her shady cousin Emir (Ernad Prnjavorac) and his friend Denis (Lazar Dragojevic), with whom she quickly develops a romantic interest, Alma sets off on a road trip where it soon feels similarly perfunctory, but Sendijarevic exhibits a knack for unique characterizations and an eye for strange details, with her meticulous 4:3 compositions creating an oddly dissociative sense of space that the narrative playfully complicates through temporal jumps and elisions alike. Based in part on the director’s own international background (she was born and raised in Bosnia, and has lived and studied in the Netherlands for much of her adult life), Sendijarevic’s film paints a perceptive portrait of dislocation and identity in contemporary Europe.—