With a well-deserved slot in the festival's Narrative Competition category, Darko Lungulov's new film is a gem of a romantic comedy—even though for much its runtime you can't really tell that it belongs in that genre...

Indeed, when we first meet grouchy, middle-aged Robert (David Thornton), who suffers from what might be called "musician's block," romance seems to be the last thing on his, or the film's, mind. That's because he's living a life so precarious that from the opening shot one might actually suspect that he's homeless. He's not—yet—but from the way that Lungulov and DP Mathias Shoningh frame and light things, for an instant it seems that our anti-hero is waking up in some sun-dappled alley, not in an apartment that's only marginally better. The reason this fleeting moment is worth mentioning is that Here and There is chock full of such gratuitous intelligence, as Lungulov's direction utterly nails things like character, setting, and theme without seeming to work too hard at it. The result is that even as Robert's life seems to spiral out of control, we can't help but be impressed by the total control over the material that the filmmakers exert.  


David Thornton as Robert: The dawn of a new day--or maybe the same old day all over again.
(Photo by Srdjan Stoiljkovic, All Rights Reserved.)

Meanwhile, the script (also by Lungulov) manages to maintain a tone just cynical enough and just warm enough to keep the audience engaged yet wary. What it doesn't do a good job of balancing, ultimately, are the parallel narratives at its core. Biting the only hands that seem even to consider feeding him, including a completely convincing Cyndi Lauper, Robert soon finds himself in an unlikely friendship-cum-business partnership with Serbian immigrant Branko (a solid Branislav Trifunovic). Branko wastes little time involving Robert in a marriage scheme that concerns fetching his would-be bride from Serbia. Clearly conceived as a back-and-forth narrative between Robert/Belgrade and Branko/New York that would justify the title, in its final form Here and There is too asymmetrical to make this conceit fully work. It feels instead as if portions of the New York storyline were truncated during the editing process. And while the overall energy of the film probably benefits from such efficiency, there are some casualties.

Chief among these are the supporting roles, which in a film like this add much of the textured humanity to the story. The third act never revisits Lauper's character, Rose, thus reducing the singer's role to little more than a cameo (although you'll want to stick around for her song over the closing credits). More problematic is the way that the key role of Branko's ally, Nuyorican mechanic Jose Escobar, is elliptically handled. Played by the always likable veteran actor Antone Pagan, Escobar is an interestingly ambiguous character and Pagan does a great job crafting a performance that reflects this while also feeling authentic. But given the build-up Escobar receives, his off-screen fate feels like a loose end, emotionally if nothing else.

That's decidedly not the case, however, with the Serbian end of things, where all the characters are given some measure of closure, even if it's just a moment, a look, a one-liner. These include divorcee Olga (a wonderful Mirjana Karanovic), the hysterically anti-American Mirko (Goran Radakovic, whose sneering "Welcome to Serbia—country in transition" is one of the film's best lines) and Tosha (a practically movie-stealing Fedja Stojanovic). In the end, then, an argument could be advanced that the title refers not to juxtaposed locations/cultures but to Robert's solo journey, which initially feels like a displacement but eventually results in a reuniting of the character with the best aspects of himself.

To its credit, though, Here and There never devolves into a simplistic tale of "How Robert Got His Groove Back." That's a tribute largely to the eye-opening performance by Thornton, who may be most recognizable from his various appearances in the Law and Order franchise. Here he handles the comedic and dramatic with equal, and equally understated, skill—his face seems to tell stories even when he's not speaking. Moreover, the director has integrated his work quite well into the film's overall strategy as a series of well-observed, entertaining scenes that often recall Jim Jarmusch's finest work, minus the artistic self-consciousness. And just when one starts to grow impatient waiting for a complication that would set the plot in a new direction, it arrives in a manner that's disarmingly effective and plausible.

Yet for all its surface originality and risk-taking, Here and There is a very conventional film at heart; in fact, you can see many of both its heart-wrenching and heart-warming moments on the horizon well before they arrive. Still, this somehow does little to mar the film's charm. For these reasons Here and There must be considered is a thinking person's date movie of the highest order. Sure, sometimes the romance is too cute. When Robert gets cream from a dessert on his nose, or when there's an intrusion of an overly "soulful" sax into the otherwise sophisticated score, the film starts to verge on schmaltz. But such moments are few and far between. What you'll take away instead are all the pleasurable performances and the enormously clever writing, which includes a killer last line.

So all in all, Here and There represents the best kind of indie filmmaking—it takes a modest but timeless premise and builds something from it that is quietly remarkable, a story both reaffirming and fresh in its message about what it means to be human.