A small village on the Skadar lake. A young American woman comes to visit, claiming her father once lived in this village. She finds a job as a waitress of a tavern, seduces its owner Baro and even persuades him to sign the ownership over to her name. Four lads from a neighboring village try to woo her, but she wants to know who is the strongest among them, so they end up fighting each other. Šćepan, a tycoon, persuades her to seduce every man and trick him into signing a document approving for his plan to build a tunnel which will drain the lake and leave a fertile valley for a plantation farm. The American woman seduces also Boro, who is unsuccessfully trying for years to have his wife Krstinja impregnated. Since the sea level is higher than the lake level, the lake floods the area. The American woman wants to marry fisherman Zeljo, but while they were on a boat, the clash with another group of men on a boat, shoot and fight, until all the men die and she is left the only one alive on the boats.
"Unseen Wonder" is considered one of the best Montenegrin movies by one of the best Montenegrin directors, Zivko Nikolic, a peculiar, but delicious satire in which the director tells one of the most ironic stories of Yugoslav cinema: the one how Western liberalism and modernism, embodied in, of course, a woman (excellent Savina Gersak) arrives to the backward conservative East and causes such a stir and commotion that it eventually reforms / destroys it. Nikolic makes fun of conservatism, patriarchism, religion, pseudo-scientific local "experts" and overall primitivism of the most backward Balkan areas with gusto, inserting a lot of humor with a lot of sense for local mentality. Several observations are subtle (all the women work in the lake, while all the men just lazily sit in the pub and drink), while some are so direct it is hard to miss them. The main protagonist, a nameless American woman of Montenegrin roots, finds this place and surprisingly turns it into her very own party, always keeping the upper hand, in a more logical feminist retelling of Pasolini's film "Teorema", using her erotic touch to control the men in her favor.
Several jokes are very funny. For instance, the American woman swims naked in the Skadar lake, while two Orthodox priests observe her from the monastery: "What is this, father Makarije? A fallen angel punished by God or the devil in woman's body?" - "No, father Leontije, that's just what the blunt people would call, a good pussy!" Makarije is later seen "helping" the infertile woman Krstinja by telling her to lie on the bed in the monastery room, while he has sex with her to "help" her become pregnant. Just as her husband Šoro wanted to divorce her since the American woman claims to be pregnant with him, Krstinja announces she is pregnant as well. Later on, in a twist, Krstinja demands that the American woman hands her the baby after birth, revealing she just placed a pillow on her stomach under the skirt—but the American woman then also reveals her own pillow from under the skirt. In a sequence where a man secretly brings the American woman to his home at night, his father wakes up and protests, as they have this exchange: "You bring this freak here? If she enters this house, I am leaving!" - "Oh, father, you will leave even sooner than that." Serb comedian Danilo STojkovic has an unusual role of the tycoon Šćepan who wants to drain the lake, but is still excellent in it. The ending is a bit vague and incomplete, failing to circle out everything clearly, but the overall conclusion is still amusing.
Grade:+++
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