Outstanding! Sjaj U Očima / Loving Glances is a warm, bright, very non-offensive yet successful in addressing issues that sparked the last civil war in Yugoslavia and the still unresolved problem of absorbing over 1 MILLION refugees from the Krajina alone! Somehow CNN and the rest of the global 'spin-doctors' were able to completely forget about the displacement of mostly (don't read only!) Serbs as well as the struggles of people who were open minded enough to enter what we call 'mixed-marriages'! I am half-Serbian half-Montenegrin but I have friends who thought they were simply Bosnian and then one day they woke up to learn that they were outcasts because they were half Serbian half Muslim! I am also from Belgrade. One of the outstanding nuances in this movie was the linguistic subtleties that I am afraid escaped the non-native speakers of Serbian/Croatian/Serbo-Croatian/Bosnian/Slovenian/Macedonian and the soon-to-be Montenegrin! Even if the English translation had been perfect, this would have been difficult to convey in the subtitles. I initially assumed that Romana's 'almost perfect' Belgrade jargon was simply a flaw in Ivana Bolanca's acting ability, only to learn that it was a perfect 'imitation' of 'Belradian' by someone from Zagreb!!! This is one of the ways I began to appreciate how great the cast of this movie is. Srdjan Karanović succeeded in making a tragic-comedy with a happy ending! The conflict did not overwhelm his main characters -- they were able to walk away from it. Ironically the guardian-angel characters could not escape it! Beograd was a perfect stage for this movie! Before this ridiculous war, my beautiful home was a safe heaven for all people regardless of race, upbringing, ethnicity, or religion! This film left me with a more than just a flicker of hope that there is a chance that Beograd can once again become that city. I am starting to feel that people like me who leave our home land trying to escape the pervasive ignorance, hyper-religiosity and radical nationalism, but never manage to bring their whole heart along may one day in a not so distant future have a home that really feels like a home to go back to!
Review of Loving Glances
