By Robert Koehler

Not all dating-match events are made equal, and the one arranged in Macedonian filmmaker Teona Strugar Mitevska’s The Happiest Man in the World is especially, you could say, toxic. The viewer is dropped in medias res in the setting, as Mitevska’s camera follows middle-aged Asja (Jelena Kordić Kuret) into a large Sarajevo hotel conference room, where couples (all hetereosexual, apparently) are matched up. Asja is unfortunately paired with lanky, dour Zoran (Adnan Omerović), and he instantly looks like trouble, and certainly not, as he describes himself at one point, “the happiest man in the world.” 

What happens next in Mitevska’s and co-writer Elma Tataragic’s script requires more than an audience leap-of-faith; it demands a wholesale abandonment of any logic, and a total acceptance of contrivance. Zoran, it seems, has an agenda for being here—with Asja at the top of it, even though they’ve never met before. The movie’s dramatic investigation of their linked background increasingly plays as strained, a kind of theatre game designed to investigate how easy it is to uncover old grudges from the horrific Bosnian civil war and the siege of Sarajevo in the mid-’90s. Mitevska tries to mine irony for maximum effect, playing off the stark contrasts of life in the city now vs. then, but the result is pedantic, with characters being arranged like games pieces on a board rather than reacting and changing in an organically developing situation. Kuret holds our point of view throughout, and her commitment is admirable, especially when things inevitably go truly crazy. At its best, this chamber drama is a cautionary tale on the dangers of old national wounds being reopened, but the mannered telling blunts the theme’s power to hit its target.

Robert Koehler