Zagreb. Filip and Stanko work boring jobs in the same office of a company, rowing on a boat on the Sava river during their time off. Filip is shy and disciplined, while Stanko is wild, raw and often late at work. Filip starts dating a co-worker, Iva, even though that is forbidden in the company they both work in. When his relationship with Iva ends, and a friend mistakes him for having an affair with his girlfriend Elvira, who was in Filip's apartment, Filip becomes depressed, becomes drunk and falls asleep in a train, waking up in Mučna Reka. After a week of unexplained absence from work, he is scolded by the boss and warned to not do that again. During the company rowing contest, Filip and Stanko win, but then just continue rowing along Sava and disappear over the horizon.
The only feature length film directed by the most respected film scholar of Croatia, Ante Peterlić, "Accidental Life" is a peculiar art-film that did not gain much attention initially due to its restrained and low-key approach, but is an overall interesting existential meditation on the emptiness of urban life in search for some meaning and excitement. Peterlić directs the movie with a minimalist, classic aesthetic, with elegant camera frames, showing the two disparate protagonists Filip and Stanko as yin and yang, though the story is lacking, not able to truly align into some articulated whole. The best bits are some dry attempts at humor—for instance, the rowdy Stanko is often late to work, and in one sequence arrives 45 minutes late in the office. When scolded for it, Stanko becomes agitated: "I guess I must be the most important person in the company when everyone waits for my arrival! You are scared that a person isn't affraid to come 45 minutes late, instead of 45 minutes early! I don't know what all the fuss is about when there is a general rule that nobody in this company works in the first hour anyway." It is both amusing and a subtle commentary on Communist companies back in the day that were not efficient in work. The superior in the office even later makes a graph of Stanko's delays at work. One sequence even is totally bizarre and weird: the one where Filip, Stanko and others go to an interactive experimental play where actors use axes to hack a cupboard and throw chickens at the audience, which is a rather heavy-handed symbolism of extreme art as a new form of decadence in urban life. The movie needed more inspiration and ideas, since it does suffer from empty walk and occasional lukewarm charge, relying more on form than content, but it does have a literate knowledge of filmmaking.
Grade:++
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