Reflections (1987)

Too many fans seem to be blown away

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

"Vec vidjeno" is the greatest masterpiece of all times. Goran Markovic is one of the greatest directors. This film features excellent acting of Mustafa Nadarevic and Anica Dobra, charming and touching music, sounding in the film. The music creates this mysterious atmosphere which charming spectators. Crossing of today's events and past events made in a very appropriate way. And it proves the Markovic' skill. Look at the Anica Dobra and her appearance and you will realize that she ideally matches the film character! What about Mustafa Nadarevic? He matches even more! Look at furnishings of past events! How it corresponds to reality! The greatest work of the great director and actors!

Goran Markovic's 1987 "Vec vidjeno" (aka Deja Vu) certainly was an ambitious production; heralded in the local press at the time of its release as "the first real Yugoslav urban psycho-thriller/horror", it left both the critics and the previously Hitchcock/Polanski/DePalma/Carpenter-educated audiences fairly unimpressed and it's easy to see why: the story told by the film - and the way it's told - is not just derivative, it's a half-baked catalogue of genre clichés hastily stitched together in hope they would all work in the end and in the domestic setting. Sadly, they didn't. The acting is fairly wooden thanks to a contrived dialogue (Mustafa Nadarevic, in his first, and very likely last role as a sexually frustrated/Oedipally challenged piano-teacher-come-psychopathic-killer is badly miscast and as such barely watchable; even more so and to the point of embarrassment is Anica Dobra - as ever in dire need of more acting/elocution lessons - as the leggy blonde-object-of-his-attention/attraction). Always reliable character actors such as Olivera Markovic and Bogdan Diklic are left with little or nothing to do in their supporting roles, and the film haemorages heavily towards its heavy handed, clumsy and sluggish "dramatic" climax, burdened further still by Zoran Simjanovic's microwave-friendly but ultimately putrid music score.The only half-redeeming aspect of the production in this feature is a studious (sometimes conspicuously so) effort to make this a "period piece" - the story is supposed to be happening in the early seventies - by way of costumes, hairdos, set designs and art direction, such attention to detail being relatively rare in Yugoslav cinema of the time, and this is where the film gathers its few good points; further back in the past, the childhood flashback sequences are nicely shot, all steeped in the nostalgic golden-orange sfumato seeping into luxurious rooms of pre-war Belgrade from between the curtains and/or blinds, and so on. Still, the overall impression is the one of directorial ineptness in the face of the demands of the genre, despite obvious fondness of it (Markovic had already flirted with the thriller/horror genre once before, in his 1982 "Variola vera", and to marginally less questionable effect). "Vec vidjeno/Deja Vu" is hardly his best effort, and is today of interest only to local film buffs and unselective Yugoslav movie collectors, such as the author of this comment.

In my opinion, "Vec vidjeno" is the best movie of Goran Markovic (and all of them are great), one of the best Serbian directors.It's done in cognizable Markovic's way. The story is great (it is by Markovic, also), acting of Mustafa Nadarevic is superb, Zoran Smijanovic's music is excellent as everything else in this movie.It is a horror movie, which is not a typical Yugoslav genre, [besides "Davitelj protiv davitelja" (which is more like comedy) and "Leptirica" I can't think of another], but it is done in a way that Hitchcock would envy. If any film deserves the Oscar then this is the one!

Vec vidjeno is the gem in Goran Markovic`s opus. Markovic is in my opinion the best Yugoslav director of all time, and his movies in a satirical way perfectly portrayed society and social distorsions in Yugoslavia at the end of 70`s and up to the mid 80`s. Vec vidjeno (or also known as Deja Vu), is however looking on the other side of life, and horror, with the unavoidable elements of society`s flaws, raging from before World war II, up to mid 70`s where the plot is set. This is the most complete, griping and artistic Yugoslav movie that takes you by surprise and stares right in your face up to the very end