A Yugoslav-American billionaire invested a fortune to restore a defunct monastery on a Yugoslav island because he is obssessed with its brandy which he didn't taste for decades. The mute monks who made it have disappeared, so the billionaire's daughter Ella travels from the US to the island to help re-create the brandy herself. Attracted by a large sum of money, numerous scammers show up pretending to be monks, including Bogoljub, their only requirement being that they don't speak. Bogoljub has to hide from his mother, Zorka, but when she shows up on the island and recognizes him, his cover is over. A gypsy band kidnaps Zorka by mistake, thinking she is Ella, to demand ransom to create an independent gypsy state, but Zorka saves herself. An old monk in the cave shows up and helps re-create the brandy with the final touch: igniting its surface in the glass. Bogoljub and Ella fall in love.
The director Slobodan Sijan ("Who's That Singing Over There?", "The Marathon Family") didn't manage to stand out with this overstretched and thin comedy which runs out of steam fairly quickly. "Cognac" (literal Serbo-Croatian translation: "The secret of the monastery brandy") starts out well, with at least one sympathetic and funny joke: while describing the life of the monastery, the American assistant says that the monks "never spoke or cried-out even during the direst emergency", as the flashback shows a monk trying to pick a herb on top of a cliff, but a rock breaks underneath him, so he just opens his mouth in "silent shouting" as he falls down into the sea, not ushering a single word. However, the main tangle where the rich American Ella travels to the island to restore the monastery but all the people showing up there are scammers pretending to be monks to get her money had much more potential than the rather routine story flow we got. Some jokes still manage to ignite (American Ella goes to a bank to exchange her money, but since one US dollar is worth a 1,000 Yugoslav dinars, the bank clerk gives her a full sack of money, so she goes: "The exchange rate here is great!"), but there is too much empty walk and the story drags. The authors wanted to make an "international film", so they majority of the dialogue is in English, and it features several American actors, including even Rick Rossovich ("The Terminator") who plays one of the fake monks who cannot say a word, whereas the locations on the Mljet island are wonderful. Unfortunately, the movie didn't have inspiration to conjure up better jokes (one missed opportunity, for instance, is the the underground cave laboratory to try to distill the brandy, which could have been used for several gags), and thus the last third feels especially faded and tacky, ending on a stale and pale note.
Grade:+
No comments:
Post a Comment