The Dark Side of the Sun

Tamna strana sunca; romantic drama / tragedy, USA / Canada / Montenegro, 1988, D: Božidar Nikolić, S: Brad Pitt, Cheryl Pollak, Guy Boyd, Constantin Nitchoff, Milena Dravić, Gorica Popović, Sonja Savić

Rick is a young lad who suffers from a rare skin disease which prohibits him to come in contact with the Sun or ever any light. he thus has to wear a black mask when he goes out of the house. Rick's father brought him to the Yugoslav coastline to see a healer, hoping to cure him. During a masquerade party at a local town, Rick, under the mask, meets an American girl, Frances, but is afraid she will reject him for the disease and thus leaves. Fed up with this state, including his mentally frail mother, Rick decides to take away the mask and simply introduce himself to Frances. They become friends, but she insists at seeing the masked guy she met. Rick does not reveal his real identity,  appears under the mask, and makes love with Frances in the dark of a cottage at night. The next morning, Frances spots Rick's necklace, and realizes he is the masked guy. Frances arrives at Rick's mansion, but he, now under terminal skin inflammation, leaves on the motorcycle into the sunset.

One of the most incredible coincidences in cinema involved Montenegrin director Bozidar Nikolic—the author of the cult satire "Balkan Spy"—holding an audition for his 1988 film "The Dark Side of the Sun", casting an unknown American actor in the lead, only for the said actor to later advance into one of the most famous stars of his time—Brad Pitt. Retroactively, this sparked new interest for "Dark Side", which is a rather standard example of the romance subgenre where one of the lovers has only a short amount of time to live—it comes dangerously close to a soap opera due to its routine dialogue, always walking a thin line between a sappy melodrama and an intimate tragedy, yet its honesty and genuine emotions are so refreshingly tender, uncynical that the viewers simply adapt to this frequency and go with it after a while. Pitt's character Rick does not take his black mask off until 35 minutes into the film, but already displays that distinctive charm that helped his ascent: when Rick, wearing his mask, mingles freely during a masquerade ball, he sits at the table of a young actress, Frances, and they have this exchange when she asks: "What brings you to Yugoslavia?" - "You!" Their slowly building relationship is interesting, because Rick appears once under the mask, and then without the mask, feigning two different guys, in fear that Frances will reject him upon finding out about his light sensitivity disease. In a way, she is Roxanne, and Rick is both Cyrano de Bergerac and Christian in one. The movie is a gentle thought experiment about a person who would rather live his life to the fullest for a short amount of time than a long life of constant hiding. The father pays large amount of cash to a local healer, hoping to cure Rick, but in the second half of the film, the healer unexpectedly arrives at the father's mansion and returns his money to the full, which is an example of honor rarely seen on film. Despite the too narrow approach, the narrative has its moments (Rick swimming for the first time in the sea, while a dolphin shows up) whereas the ending is much more touching, poignant and swift than the viewers might have expected at first: everything leads to it, yet it still hits you like a ton of bricks.

Grade:++