Seize the Day

The film poster of the Yugoslavian film THE FRAGRANCE OF WILD FLOWERS (1977).

Have you ever felt like you were not leading the life you imagined for yourself or worse – you had achieved success in your field but felt as if everything had become a boring, mechanical routine and you were trapped? This is the existential dilemma that is facing Ivan Vasiljevic (Ljuba Tadic), a famous theater actor, who is currently preparing for a production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. The day before the play’s premiere, Ivan walks out during the rehearsal, refusing to return, and decides to abandon everything, including his wife. He joins his friend Jeca Smrda (Nemanja Zivic) aboard a rundown barge and settles into a life of leisure with no responsibilities as they drift along the shore of the Danube. While Ivan’s nonconformist rebellion seems to mirror the behavior of free-spirited characters in American films like Murray (Jason Robards Jr.) in A Thousand Clowns (1965) or the poet Samson (Sean Connery) in A Fine Madness (1966), his journey, as depicted in Miris Poljskog Cveca (English title: The Fragrance of Wild Flowers, 1977), becomes a wry satire and meditation on one man’s life in Yugoslavia under a Socialist regime. But the film is not a political critique and opts instead for an offbeat character study.

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Memories of the 2011 TCM Classic Film Festival

*This article originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, Turner Classic Movies’s official blog in May 2011 (The blog was discontinued years ago and is no longer available available)

In the event-packed hurly burly of TCM’s second annual Film Festival in Los Angeles from April 28-May 1 of 2011, I didn’t have a chance to blog about all of the films or attending guests that I saw but here are a few that linger in the memory and deserve to be singled out –cinematographer/director Haskell Wexler, who participated in a Q&A with Leonard Maltin before a screening of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(1966), Hayley Mills, who appeared after a screening of Whistle Down the Wind (1961) with interviewer/author Cari Beauchamp, a midnight screening of The Mummy (1932) introduced by Boris Karloff fan Ron Perlman, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928) accompanied by a live orchestra score by Vince Giordano and His Nighthawks, the MoMA restoration print showing of 1933’s Hoopla (Clara Bow’s final film) and the underrated Ernst Lubitsch Pre-Code delight Design for Living (1933).

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