A man dissolves into a shimmering silhouette before passing through a wall into the afterlife in Dane Komljen’s ghostly “Desire Lines,” which held its world premiere Aug. 11 in Locarno’s main International Competition.
A Berlin-based, Serbian filmmaker and visual artist known for his sharp, pensive slow cinema, Komljen was first recognized for his 2010 debut short “I Already Am Everything I Want to Have,” which shared a third prize at Cannes’ Cinefondation film school shorts competition. After exhibiting over a dozen films at festivals such as Rotterdam, Cinema du Réel and Sarajevo, among others, he has returned to Locarno for the fifth time with this audacious title.
“Desire Lines” follows Branko (Ivan Čuić), a jittery insomniac who floats around Belgrade at night, often in obsessive pursuit of his younger brother. This nighttime routine leads him to bizarre places – on his knees in the forest, or riding the bus without any reflection– until he begins anew in the woods among a calm community of “non-humans.”
In this idyll forest, Komljen contraposes urban restlessness with natural respite, where Branko is able to literally fuse into the natural world of flora and fauna.
Komljen creates an ostensible utopia for those ostracised from urban spaces, with days now spent stewing apricots, weaving baskets, kissing rocks, and conversing with mushrooms. “Queers are often told that how we live and how we love is not natural,” says Komljen, who wanted to resist the ways that nature is weighed against queerness.
In the absence of traditional dialogue, Branko and co. find comfort in nonverbal trysts with nature, which are inherent to Komljen’s scripts. Similar to his “Afterwater” (2022), there is a strong lyrical aspect to the dialogue where characters actively reflect on their former lives through confession-like narration. Nevertheless, Komljen says that this is the first time he wrote something close to a “traditional script.” He notes that his cinema to date, while fiction, pulls a lot from essay film tactics.
At times reminiscent of the bodily anxieties of Alain Guiraudie’s films, “Desire Lines” features a number of kinky, inventive interludes, involving thermal camera, computerized creatures, and stroboscopic images of labor. “There is something queer about [the visuals], as if there is one texture of the image that constantly keeps spilling out or slipping into something else, into a different mold.”
“Desire Lines” features striking locations, exposing both the extremes of city-living and the stillness of pastoral landscapes. Shot over 32 days by two cinematographers, Ivan Marković and Jenny Lou Ziegel, the film is split regionally between the city of Belgrade and the rural areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina. “I wanted to explore these settings on their own terms to create two different experiences that will then merge.” These two experiences facilitate a narrative shift between the tension of urban and rural, so inherent in Komljen’s films, and manifesting here as catharsis. “It is a film about shifts and I wanted there to be a shift within the gaze itself that’s very subtle, but that becomes the experience of the film,” he adds.
In jilting conventional storytelling, Komljen also reroutes the political dimensions of this work to visual subtext. “I’m not a politician, I’m a filmmaker,” Komljen maintains. But his dedicated attention to establishing shots of residential buildings within the Serbian capital still gesture toward the fraught history of his hometown, which the characters are pointedly escaping. In one scene, Branko, a ghost, walks passively across a border without being stopped – a utopian ideal in itself. The impulse to pursue fantasy rather than grim realism reveals a generous sensibility which opens up the solitary figure of Branko to the audience. “I’m not sure that cinema functions as a window anymore. I’m more interested in the power of imagination and world building,” Komljen concludes.
