Past imperfect

>> My Father's Angel confronts the wounds of war

by MARK SLUTSKY

My Father's Angel, the debut feature from Sarajevo-born director Davor Marjanovic, has its heart in the right place. The film, set in Vancouver, attempts to deal with the lingering human cost of the war in the former Yugoslavia by bringing into contact, through a traffic accident, two families--one Bosnian Muslim, the other Serbian--on what amounts to neutral ground. The Muslim family, recent immigrants, are still traumatized by the atrocities they both witnessed and were subjected to; the Serbian family, having moved to Canada before the war, are in a state of denial, refusing to accept the accounts of the war they read in the papers.

On the face of it, this is not such a bad idea for a movie. There's certainly enough dramatic fodder inherent in the situation, enough complications, to make for a pretty interesting study of guilt and redemption. Sadly, My Father's Angel--perhaps weighed down by the unthinkable burden of the so-recent catastrophe--collapses into a mess of embarrassing Canadian-movie clichés. For instance: Ahmed (Tony Nardi), father of the Muslim family, in his desperation, prays for an angel to come deliver his brood. Does that angel take human form? She sure does! And is she a street-wise, hair-dyed "punker" type? You got it!

My Father's Angel is full of this sort of thing, plus cinematic techniques familiar to anyone who's sat through a couple of CBC TV movies--bad pseudo-jazz, blurry slow-motion denoting heightened emotional states. Why do so many Canadian movies resort to such nonsense? Are tough-talking street kids some kind of grant requirement?

My Father's Angel's one saving grace is Tygh Runyan, who plays Enes, Nardi's son. Runyan has strong cinematic presence, with his expressive face and too-wide, teenage-awkward grin. Some of his scenes, especially those when he's in the presence of his shattered, catatonic mother (Asja Pavlovic), a victim of unspeakable torture and rape, actually come close to achieving the kind of resonance Marjanovic is striving for. Elsewhere in the movie, though, Pavlovic herself really piles it on, playing her scenes over-the-top and wildly operatic. Marjanovic's handling of her character--essentially milking her horrible situation for every dramatic drop--feels cheap, and the character's eventual fate isn't that dissimilar from that of the victimized woman in a standard melodrama.

It's a shame about My Father's Angel. It's just so typically, terribly forgettable. Yes, the subject matter is incredibly difficult and loaded with historical baggage, and I suppose Marjanovic deserves some credit for trying. The situation demands filmmaking far more sophisticated than this; the movie's endless histrionics do no service to the conflict's survivors.

My Father's Angel opens Friday, Dec. 1