It is not easy to find a novel by Pavao Pavlicic that couldn't be transferred to a movie. And it is impossible to find the movie made after his novels that was a failure. Finally, it would be very difficult to find a director that could feel Pavlicic's novels so well, so deeply like Tadic had.
It is a pity that Pavlicic was writing and Tadic making movies in a country that is not rich enough to use all those potentialities – in some other cinematography it's easy to imagine Tadic making one movie per year and at least half of them making after Pavlicic's novels.
In "Ritam zlocina" Tadic feels not only the soul of the novel, but the soul of Zagreb suburbs where the movie takes place. Suburbs that have mostly vanished by now, or will in only few years. Suburbs that have their own soul, their own life, that have existed in almost every big town in the world, that have been villages a century ago, and have been slowly approached, then surrounded and finally swallowed and digested by their big neighbor. But in those few decades when they were in process of turning from villages to towns they developed some special characteristics, where people kept their gardens as miniatures of old fields and meadows, still digging a little and growing carrots and tulips, keeping old close relations to the neighbors, knowing every person living two streets away, not only by name, but knowing names of their distant relatives somewhere in Germany or America, knowing what these people do for life (officially or illegally), knowing what church they go to (if they do), what will they kids become in their lives (often better than their own parents). Life similar to life in some streets few blocks away from the centre of smaller towns like Virovitica, Bjelovar, Vinkovci, Koprivnica... But people in those small towns have to walk five minutes to reach the centre that has few big buildings, one theater, one big and several small stores, a hospital and a police station, some public services and a soccer stadium and a hall for handball and basketball. People in big town suburbs have to take a tram or bus and suddenly they are in another world, another space. So many possibilities offered, so many choices. But, in the same time, so many dangers, so many temptations. One square big as their whole suburb, one park bigger than all their gardens and schoolyard put together, one skyscraper giving homes to more people that will ever live in their area bounded by three avenues and a river. Magnificent and frightening, astonishing and threatening, seducing like Delilah, like Circe, like Sirens ready to swallow too incautious sailors. So they prefer to stay in their little shell, hoping that big, strange and perilous world won't touch their small community – though deep inside knowing that it is inevitably.
(This vanishing world of Zagreb's suburbs was shown in "Tko pjeva zlo ne misli" and "Snivaj, zlato moje"; but both movies take place in former decades – before or just after WWII, and how these suburbs look like today can be seen best in serial "Smogovci", and partially in "Ispod crte".) And then the day comes when machines come and in only few days the century old streets, houses, gardens disappear to make place for heartless 10 or 20 floor buildings same as in every town on the Earth. Those small worlds that each have its own soul, ow spirit are replaced by one same world that has no soul, no spirit.
"Ritam zlocina" has to be seen as an ode or epitaph for those worlds. And the original title of the novel "Good Spirit of Zagreb" expresses this mood much better. Everything in the movie is less important. But not less great.
This movie preserves this world forever, keeps it for the history. And in the same time, the movie is one of the most prominent stones in building of Croatian movie history.
