VIFF 2016: A Good Wife
(Serbia/Bosnia/Croatia)
Tackling heavyweight themes in a small-scaled way, this tale of truth and reconciliation (or their opposites) is grounded by a powerhouse performance from Mirjana Karanovic, who also wrote and directed it.
She plays a Serbian housewife and mother who has always, it seems, meekly accepted her mostly good fortune in life. Then she has a sobering medical visit at exactly the same time she accidentally discovers that her beloved husband committed war crimes during the Yugoslavian war of the 1990s. The movie’s form is a bit clumsy at times (the music is schlocky), and this first-time filmmaker could have gestured a bit more forcefully at how young Serbs are coping with their open national wound. But it works as a potent assertion of human, and female, rights.
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