'Rest in peace' - the peak of domestic feature TV production

There is no doubt that some moments, and probably entire episodes of this series, will be difficult for some viewers, but one of the basic tasks of good drama series is to shake and wake up the audience.

For a long time now, no domestic drama series has appeared on Croatian television that would fit into the world trend of flourishing television fiction. Local TV commissioners obviously don't even think that viewers expect more from the series, so they mistakenly believe in the inexhaustibility of interest in nonsense and frantically release soap operas, occasionally allowing themselves, in attacks of insane adventure, to dive into more or less successful comedies. The dramas have stalled somewhere at the level of the seventies, they are mostly bad to mediocre, so the axiom about TV big shots that are afraid of their own shadow has already taken root; that is why they do not try to find out whether the audience is ready for the so-called more demanding content, wondering in a cold sweat if such decision would turn off the audience or, God forbid, anger someone sensitive with cash in their pocket. For a long time, it seemed that no one offered them anything of quality because of that.

The new drama series 'Rest in Peace', which airs on January 4 on HTV's First Channel, breaks down these obstacles and assumptions on several levels - at least judging by the first three episodes. In them, a young journalist Lucija Car (Judita Franković) reveals the secrets of those buried in the cemetery of the old prison scheduled for demolition, with the help of retired prison guard Martin Strugar (Miodrag Krivokapić). In each episode, the story of one grave unfolds, although, behind the backs of a dynamic duo, an evil spirit released from a bottle in the first episode recedes throughout the series.

Already in the first three episodes, catching up with world trends is very noticeable. I’m not saying that a revolution erupts from every frame or that HBO will stumble on creators' doorstep tomorrow crying with envy, but in the context of domestic production, the series is not only a shift but also an Air-Jordan kind of leap towards better. First and foremost, it looks worldly (silly and inaccurate adjective, I know, but you know what I mean), and not just because of the shooting technique and beautiful filters that achieve the gloomy-brownish atmosphere of digging through a troubled past. There are also wonderful details such as when Lucija meets Martin in the courtyard of his old Zagreb building (Ratkajev prolaz) and the yard looks like a prison, which suggests that the old cat never stopped being a guard. The girls and guys who put it together, therefore, know how to express themselves visually and we finally got a series that can’t be watched as a radio drama, with your back facing the TV. A dose of claustrophobia is also brilliantly evoked, inevitable for a story so much about prison: everything takes place in somewhat cramped spaces, car interiors, cells, shelters, and backrooms of shabby nightclubs, in front of many scenes the door is half or completely closed, and the whole suffocating atmosphere is thickened by a soundtrack with a finely hit ratio of melancholy and sinisterness.

But if that was the only thing that counts in the series, everyone would normally give up watching at half of the first episode (we can also see beautiful visual elements in documentaries about animals on National Geographic), but fortunately - it's not like that. Besides looking nice, the stories and characters from the first three episodes are also quite interesting, there is zero chance they'll bother you with anything, but they also won't allow you to cook beans along the way. There is everything here: from prison psychopaths who show their dominance over the environment in the first sentence to the revealing of the character of prison guards (which is perhaps the strongest for me), whose morals and emotions cannot remain intact in the environment of a repressive and unhappy institution. The actors are excellent - I didn't expect anything less from the legendary Krivokapić, Judita Franković is convincing and nice, Janko Popović Volarić achieved something truly exceptional in the third episode with astonishingly few words, and I will write about Nada Gačešić Livaković later. They did, however, have grateful material. Namely, the characters they play are very layered and enriched with a bunch of inherent details, and along the way, they are given sentences that the viewer can imagine being uttered by a normal human being, which is almost a precedent in domestic production.

Much has already been said and written about the third episode of the series, mostly because of the painful presentation of the relationship between Croats and Serbs in the early 1990s. This Serbo-Croatian blues, from which no one in this country has been able to heal since the church schism, was miraculously not described in this series through a strict war perspective. Yes, air-raid sirens are heard, Vukovar and someone's son who returned from the battlefield without legs are mentioned, but there is no uniform other than that of the prison guards, no shooting or trench mud, not even flags. The whole story is told much more uneasily: through the prism of prison bullies, but also through the atmosphere of fear and intolerance in neighborhoods, through scenes of neighbors refusing to hold the door as you enter the building, and through shots of graffitis sprayed on the front door of someone's private apartment. There is nothing new in this - we all know that such things have happened, we have all, regardless of ethnicity, heard humiliating sentences about 'our boys and your boys' in shelters, but this is something completely new, and completely different fitted in the story than ever before. This fit into the story is summarized by a brilliant sentence by Martin Strugar. 'War is on the other side of the fence', he told a group of prison thugs. 'But here, inside - brotherhood and unity! You are all the same to me! You are all brothers in crime.' The sentence was uttered in 1992, from the inner building of the prison fence and far from the real, outer reality, but it resonates throughout the episode and is applicable far more widely. It will surely sit hard on someone's stomach. And it should.

The third episode is, therefore, undoubtedly important, but as a personal favorite I would still single out the second. The much less (actually not at all) politically charged story of a girl who died in prison at the age of nineteen is deeply shocking, even emotionally devastating, not only because of the really dark story of the deceased but also because of the character of prison guardian Josipa. I have never been a special fan of Nada Gačešić Livaković and until a few days I would rudely claim that her last good role was in 'Kapelski kresovi'. Here, however, she knocked me off my feet and her buzzword 'You little trash' in one of the last scenes almost literally broke my heart (I totally broke, yes). The second episode is also the most skilfully performed: the time jumps by which the series is recognizable are somehow the most subtle, and the hints of past events (for example, mother's suicide) are perfectly shortened to just as much information as the viewer needs to reconstruct the events himself, without superfluous explanations (a stylistic procedure that domestic TV authors have so far feared like hell).

Of course, this one, like any other series, is not without flaws. Hair from an egg could be pulled out because some (mostly younger) actors sometimes (less often than elsewhere) sound like they are reading a text from a teleprompter, Lucija lives with her retired mother and sick brother in a slightly too cozy apartment, scenes from Lucija's office are clichéd and copy-pasted from American series (along with exclamations: 'You’re suspended!'), and because from the first three episodes, it’s not even clear why Lucija’s boyfriend even exists as a notable figure in the series. We could object a bit to the obvious product placement of some little things, as well as the fact that the author's affection for the Danish 'Forbrydelsen', some tricks from 'Forgotten Case' and Helen Mirren from her inspector Jane Tennison's phase is very clear, but they are all minor things, so far quite insignificant for the general assessment.

And the general evaluation is - don’t miss this series. We’ve never seen anything like that from domestic production. And it was really about time.

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