Ten years after the outbreak of the Balkan war, as Slobodan Milosevic's regime collapses in Yugoslavia, Breda Beban revisits her birthplace armed with a digital video camera. Named after a heartbreaking Balkan folk song, 'Too Early for Sorrow, Too Late for Happiness?' captures the almost unbearable intensities of an event in which a moment of personal history and a moment of social history are blurred into one.
The cinema -scale projection explodes with situations, characters and sounds. As if by magic, however, this apparent chaos of emotions and abstractions acquires a certain coherence. Breda Beban's statuesque presence - carefully picked out by a low-key spotlight - together with the controlled informality of her narrating voice, suggest that we are being asked to believe that reality is actually being transformed before our very eyes. But Beban's occasional hesitations, the breaks in her voice and the tears in her eyes that suggest 'we can't see it but we can feel it' compel us in another direction. At length, we begin to think that all this is an accident, and that there's really no one in charge, least of all the writer/director Breda Beban.
This performance is the most recent of a series of pieces in which Beban seeks to come to terms with her position as an exiled artist who, for all that she has found a new home in England and successfully continued her career there, still feels intensely about her native country and grieves for the people who are suffering the hardships of civil war. From 'The Left Hand Should Know' (1992) and 'Hand on the Shoulder' (1997) - both made together with Hrvoje Horvatic - through to her solo works 'May 98' (1998) and last year's impressive 'Let's Call it Love', Beban has found ways to convey the complex and often contradictory emotions that accompany 'displacement'. She does this in an unmistakably personal style: direct, yet subtle; deceptively simple, yet always touching upon the complexities of life and, for that matter, of art.
- Leo Reijnen
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