Zagreb. 24 hours in the life of Marko. He wakes up, has breakfast, and goes to work in his job of printing press. Intermittently, he has recollections from his childhood—his father was killed during World War II; his grandmother brought him up—and thinks about his contemporary time—he divorced from his wife who takes care of their little son; he has a new lover, but she is pregnant and wants an abortion; he writes novels, but nobody wants to publish them. While watching some men beat up a horse on the street that doesn't want to move, it starts to rain and Marko imagines he talks with his late father. At the end of the day, Marko returns back to his apartment, has dinner, watches TV, and then goes to bed.
"Monday or Tuesday" continues the director Vatroslav Mimica's 'stream-of-consciousness' phase ("Kaya, I'll Kill You!"), depicting 24 hours in the life of Marko, where recollections and flashbacks of his childhood are filmed in color, while the present is filmed in black and white, to symbolize the alienation of that generation with the current time they are living in. The overall result has its ups and downs: some moments are better than the others. The opening 8-minute sequence, for instance, is brilliant—it depicts Marko having a dream of himself, in color, in a park as an old grandmother with a red umbrella is shouting: "Marko! Marko!" Marko says: "Grandma, here I am!", but the woman just walks pass him to talk to a child that represents Marko as a kid. The strange flashbacks are filmed in surreal way, sometimes interwoven with fantasy—for instance, a wall of an orange crust melts and collapses in slow motion, and then the movie jumps to grandma covering the eyes of the kid Marko as Fascist soldiers, with Freddy Krueger-like masks, take his wounded father, bleeding, away from the house.
Another moment has kid Marko crawling through some tunnel, while a sleeping grown-up Marko in the present is seen releasing a tear from his closed eye. An indeed great start to a film, but the rest starts losing its power, especially in some banal and heavy-handed random archive clips of corpses and war crimes from World War II juxtaposed with the peaceful modern city milieu. Some moments repeat the greatness on their own, unique way—for example, at work, Marko asks a colleague if he knows someone who can make an abortion, but the guy advises him against it: "Keep the child. I'll be your best man!" - "Are you crazy? Where do we get the apartment?" - "Look at all the space. It wouldn't be bad to have another little Marko in the Universe", as he shows Marko a photo of a whole Galaxy in space. The rest of the movie struggles to justify this loose structure and meandering of random episodes, falling into the trap of empty walk. For instance, the episode revolving around a man (Fabijan Sovagovic) showing Marko his pigeon coop leads nowhere, save for some neat moments of freeze frames of a pigeon flapping its wings. Yet, all the scenes of Marko just walking through the streets without a goal can only go so far untilt he viewers' patience starts to get exhausted. A tighter narrative would have been welcomed, since various experimentals films feel less fresh today. As the movie abruptly ends, one cannot feels as if something is missing in the overall picture, though Mimica has a couple of interesting stylistic ideas (the camera pans from a black and white scene on the left, through dark, to a scene in color on the right).
Grade:++
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