A coming-of-age drama that gradually turns morose, Blerta Basholli’s sophomore feature “Dua” follows up her Sundance-winning 2021 debut “Hive” as a reflection of Kosovan women in the late 1990s. This time, however, the director draws from her own experiences as a girl who came of age in the shadow of the Kosovo War. The conflict looms large over the film’s Kosovar Albanian teens — as does institutionalized discrimination against them — but Basholli’s intentionally blinkered focus, through the eyes of her 13-year-old protagonist, proves constraining and liberating all at once. Subjective to a fault, “Dua” is, by any overarching measure, a mixed bag of dramatic experiences, yet it unfolds with the confidence of something fully and richly formed.
Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose” sets the mood and era, as the camera glances over the shoulder of — and practically past — withdrawn protagonist Dua (Pinea Matoshi), while her high school classmates eagerly discuss which boys they want to flirt with at a party. Through scenes of gossip, frolicking and even a foot chase as cops try to shut the revelry down, Basholli introduces her setting (Prishtina, Kosovo in the late ‘90s) as though the audience were an eager participant in every conversation, and privy to the girls’ secrets.
As the lens follows Dua, often up close and from behind, this mode of expression proves alternately absorbing and alienating. However, the emotional effects of Basholli’s aesthetic have intellectual and political dimensions too. While the camera is locked into Dua’s perspective, the world outside her peripheral vision changes radically in ways we aren’t allowed to see; the corner of the frame practically become a venue from which to intuit horrors.
We are, however, allowed to hear these things — or rather, to experience them through eerie, jagged sound design that embodies each metamorphosis as distorted construction echoes. Dua, like the world around her, is a work in progress, but could collapse at any second. The closest we come to witnessing this demolition is the frequent (if repetitive) radio news broadcasts denoting geopolitical developments courtesy of world leaders far away.
More effective and immediate than any political tome is the unnerving implication of state and sexual violence just outside the frame, which intrude upon Dua’s innocent saga of searching for her first kiss, and waiting for her first period. For Dua, puberty and social maturity become knotted up in unpredictable notions of bodily harm (whether acted upon, or merely threatened), as Serbian boys and men harass her on the way home from school, lacing their catcalls with ethnic slurs. In a desperate response, she looks to one of her hardened refugee classmates, Maki (Vlera Billali) — for whom war has been a more tangible reality — to help formulate a response. Some weeks of judo training later and Dua is physically ready to retaliate, but she lacks the emotional tools to properly channel her righteous anger, which inadvertently paints a target on her family’s back.
As the film traipses between these various plot points, its nature as a collection of memories proves both its biggest strength and weakness. “Dua” lacks the cohesion of traditional drama; its naturalistic tone seldom complements its nearly stream-of-consciousness unfurling, which might have benefited from a more esoteric or dreamlike visual approach. And yet, the film’s naturalism also helps bind its disparate parts. Matoshi is a revelation, performing with a deceptive simplicity beyond her years, as she layers a quiet eagerness and confusion beneath her apparent stoicism. Basholli discovered her young lead when auditioning her sister Kaona, cast in turn as Dua’s on-screen sister Tina. This is one of several instances of emotional realism that pierce the film’s temporal veil — turning it, in theory, from a series of recollections into a more pressing and contemporary saga of how war trickles down and transforms the lives of young girls in fundamental ways.
Dua’s family is at the center of a number of scenes, which Basholli and cinematographer Lucie Baudinaud capture in long, unbroken takes. These shots force one’s eye towards Dua, not only as an individual, but as a puzzle piece within a larger portrait, in which other key figures (her brother, her father, and so on) have their own battles to fight, privately and on the front lines. All the while, as a younger sibling, Dua is shut out of major conversations (sometimes literally, as bedroom doors are closed in her face and important decisions are made without her), branding her an outsider even in her own home. It’s quite stirring in spurts, even if the whole seldom coheres as a moment in time and space.
These stylistic flourishes work to endear Dua to the audience. She’s a child observing and absorbing a changing world, but the film itself is rarely concerned with these observations. Sometimes, the frame is transfixed by haunting, practically subliminal changes fomenting on a subconscious level, as Dua is shaken from within, and the remarkable Matoshi doles out nuggets of recognizable emotion from beneath her rock-hard exterior. At other points, however, Basholli’s subjective camera plateaus in energy: It can only follow Dua down halls and alleyways so many times until the film’s seams begins to show, and tear.
Rare are the moments in which there’s enough of an “objective” view — a wider, top-down observation of the world around Dua — to make the film a true retrospective on a period lived and processed, and an expression of a filmmaker looking back on her childhood with some kind of wistfulness, or bitterness, or any number of things. “Dua” is a good film that, by its nature, stops short of greatness. But as a re-creation of moments distantly recalled, it’s also exactly what it wants, and perhaps needs, to be.
variety.com
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