Books, Arts & Manners: Sweet and Sour

Goran Paskaljevic’s Twilight Time, a collaboration, shot in English, between Yugoslavs and Yugoslav-Americans, is the kind of film that walks the narrow ledge between sentiment and sentimentality, which, with most current reviewers, condemns it to walking the plank. A film about an 11-year-old boy and his pre-school sister—a boy, moreover, who is being taken care of by (or, more exactly, taking care of) his jolly grandfather—is sticky business. The grandfather, Marko, has spent twenty years in America, made some money there, and has come back to live quietly on drink, memories, billiards, and watching his family evolve. In this last, he is somewhat foiled: his son and daughterin-law have gone to work in Germany, and are sending back little mail and no money; they have, moreover, split up, and do not intend to return to their native Istrian village, a fact that Marko tries to keep from the grandchildren, Ivan and little Ana.

There is also Lena, the pretty new schoolteacher who is sent to take over the disused schoolhouse, and whose classes Ivan, having to take care of the family house and land (with erratic help from Marko), tends to play hooky from. Lena, too, was brought up by her grandparents after her parents divorced, and she is a gentle but sturdy loner who befriends both Marko and Ivan. Twilight Time, named after the song Marko won the Harvest Ball dance contest to in Chicago years ago—-a song he keeps playing on a 78 rpm record on ap old phonograph that bears the legend “First Prize”—is, as you must have gathered by now, a small, unassuming movie that makes no concessions to the fashions of the day. It has to contend, moreover, with an unwarrantable drawback: Jodi Thelen, the actress who made Arthur Penn and Steve Tesich’s Four Friends even worse than it had to be. As the Yugoslav Lena, she pronounces “Ivan” as “Even,” and is so full of noble tremulousness that she gives not so much a performance as an oscillogram.

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John Simon

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Goran Paskaljevic’s Twilight Time, a collaboration, shot in English, between Yugoslavs and Yugoslav-Americans, is the kind of film that walks the narrow ledge between sentiment and sentimentality, which, with most current reviewers, condemns it to walking the plank. A film about an 11-year-old boy and his pre-school sister—a boy, moreover, who is being taken care of by (or, more exactly, taking care of) his jolly grandfather—is sticky business. The grandfather, Marko, has spent twenty years in America, made some money there, and has come back to live quietly on drink, memories, billiards, and watching his family evolve. In this last, he is somewhat foiled: his son and daughterin-law have gone to work in Germany, and are sending back little mail and no money; they have, moreover, split up, and do not intend to return to their native Istrian village, a fact that Marko tries to keep from the grandchildren, Ivan and little Ana.

There is also Lena, the pretty new schoolteacher who is sent to take over the disused schoolhouse, and whose classes Ivan, having to take care of the family house and land (with erratic help from Marko), tends to play hooky from. Lena, too, was brought up by her grandparents after her parents divorced, and she is a gentle but sturdy loner who befriends both Marko and Ivan. Twilight Time, named after the song Marko won the Harvest Ball dance contest to in Chicago years ago—-a song he keeps playing on a 78 rpm record on ap old phonograph that bears the legend “First Prize”—is, as you must have gathered by now, a small, unassuming movie that makes no concessions to the fashions of the day. It has to contend, moreover, with an unwarrantable drawback: Jodi Thelen, the actress who made Arthur Penn and Steve Tesich’s Four Friends even worse than it had to be. As the Yugoslav Lena, she pronounces “Ivan” as “Even,” and is so full of noble tremulousness that she gives not so much a performance as an oscillogram.