In short: Nocturno (1974)

On her deathbed, Jelena (Milena Dravic), the deeply beloved wife of Lucio (Rade Serbedzija), promises him to return to him from beyond the veil if only his will and belief are going to be as strong as hers.

At first, Lucio only seems to half belief this promise, but a combination of grief, his diet of Romantic verse and prose and spiritualist-affine philosophy slowly seem to turn desperate hope into conviction, until Jelena indeed appears to him. At first, she’s the proverbial figure in a shroud in a foggy graveyard, but soon, Jelena returns as human, touchable and feeling as she was when she was alive – at least to Lucio. The film does keep the reality of Lucio’s experience ambiguous at first, but soon provides the audience with facts – a piano playing Chopin despite Lucio not being able to play, a diary entry in Jelena’s handwriting made after her death – that become increasingly incontrovertible. Well, not for Lucio’s family doctor, but that’s not going to be the dramatic threat you might imagine it to be.

In fact, Branko Ivanda’s Yugoslavian TV movie is not terribly interested in putting Lucio into real danger of getting thrown into a 19th Century loony bin; these elements of the plot seem mostly to be there to in the end divorce the audience completely from the assumption we are witnessing a man’s grief-drive descent into madness, and to smuggle in some subtle commentary about the destructive force of the need to conform to societal pressures (probably not a good idea to make too obvious in Yugoslavia at the time) under the film’s main drive, discussing the dichotomy between a Romantic world view, belief and hope and a rationalism that here is portrayed mostly through Lucio’s pretty stiff and unkind doctor who is probably meaning well but not really showing much human emotion at all when confronted with the very human troubles in Lucio’s heart before and after the death of Jelena.


Despite some moody moments – the graveyard scene certainly being a highlight there – Ivanda’s film is not really a horror movie, but rather one that uses the fantastical to test out ideas and compare ideologies while grounding its philosophical questions in Serbedzia’s very human portrayal of a grieving man who isn’t quite sure if he’s losing his mind. It’s really a fantasy of hope whose philosophy of a positive irrationality and emotionalism standing against cold and empty rationalism is – like basically all of the handful of Yugoslavian and Polish (mostly TV) movies concerning themselves with the fantastic I’ve managed to see – very indebted to the Romantics, and not just when it cites Schubert, Chopin, and Byron. Of course, if you ask me, the nexus between the Gothic revival and the Romantics is the birth of much of what came after in fantastic literature (and later cinema) in the Western hemisphere, so the call-back is utterly fitting to what the director is doing here.