So I have been sitting here for the last two hours, writing and re-writing the first line in what is supposed to be an overview of Vladan Nikolic’s film Love. A New York picture as comfortable with its defiance as it is with its grace, Love comprises noir, romance, cultural alienation and not just a few surrealist touches in a beautifully shot, nonlinear narrative that basically seems as though it should make no sense. At all.

Gunmen in Love: Peter Gevisser (right) and Sergej Trifunovic (Photo: Mark Higashino/Studio Belgrade)
I mean, not that it is Syriana or anything. But it is a kidnapping intrigue-turned-love triangle between a Serbian hit man, his old flame and her cop fiance, and you probably will be thinking Nikolic bit off more than he could chew by the time he introduces Love‘s secondary Lebanese, Italian, German, Canadian, Japanese and French characters. Then the threads overlap. They interlace. Whatever the characters are hiding behind those deep, brooding pauses somehow becomes clearer the longer they withhold it. And when Nikolic’s dramatic payoff–equal parts Rashomon and Reservoir Dogs–arrives like the painstakingly efficient coup that it is, you cannot help but ask yourself how the hell he did that.
“I think that noir in particular as a genre is always really interesting,” said Nikolic, whose film opened Thursday to two packed houses at the Pioneer Theater and a bustling after-party at Pianos. “If you strip it bare, it’s like, ‘What’s the story?’ It’s like one guy’s a hit man, one’s a cop and there’s this woman in between who’s a doctor. It’s kind of a ridicuous cliché, so I thought if we played with all of these clichés from this genre and give it a different context that you actually have real characters who are more multi-dimensional. The next time you see the next overlapping story, you have a new reality. What you’ve seen before has a whole different dimension. I thought it would be interesting to have this in the framework of this particular genre. And I always associate the noir with kind of this more melancholic look–in terms of the shots and the colors. It’s not sadness or aggression. It’s melancholy about something in the past. And I thought that worked really well with what this story is about.”

Granted, it took Nikolic, 40, nearly a year to figure out the story’s framework, not to mention the weeks and months spent in preproduction honing that melancholic look with ace cinematographer Vladimir Subotic. The resulting narrative is mostly anchored by Vanya (Sergej Trifunovic), a decorated former Yugoslav soldier working as a killer for hire in New York. In the middle of what he hopes will be his last job, a bizarre sequence of events reunites him with Anna (Geno Lechner), a German doctor from whom Vanya was estranged after an intense, rocky affair years before. Their flight together from the scene of the crime sets off a chase involving Anna’s lover Dirk (Peter Gevisser) and a trio of other hit men whose assignments collided with Vanya’s own.
But seeing as they stem as much from New York’s ethnic class conflicts as they do from love and money, even Nikolic’s double- and triple-crosses work to upend more conventional noir standards. His characters’ avarice features less prominently than their suffocating displacements and disconnections; more or less, Love‘s dens of thieves function as surrogate families with a single expiration date.

“People have very similar experiences, although they come form completely different cultures, backgrounds, religions and what not. But it’s like the type of human level is really the same,” said Nikolic (right), who emigrated from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, to Manhattan in 1992. “That was really fascinating, and I think that only in New York can you have that. Not only is it mixed, but it’s also concentrated in a very small area. So I always throught that I would want to make a film like that, because somehow I didn’t see that aspect of New York enough. It’s like it’s one particular immigrant’s story or it’s about something else. But this mix is amazing. Also, you have the background of the main character, which is sort of the past and the war and the memory and all that, and the idea was that all these charcters are kind of trapped in their pasts. Although they’re in a new place and a new space, they still can’t move forward, and in some ways there’s a kind of entrapment.”
Ironically or not, however, Nikolic and Subotic portray the city from the outside looking in. The director told me that European festival audiences could not believe his film’s sluggish, weedy wastelands were, in fact, the outer reaches of Brooklyn. (At Tribeca, of course, Love was featured prominently in the festival’s New York films section.) Meanwhile, Vanya’s forays into Manhattan involve lurking in the cultural fringe, from exotic, Lynchian drag bars to haunted-looking churches where he goes to pray in secret. He is shot on the move, constantly, as if working to shed his imagination or a nagging impulse to dream.
The reticence with which Love‘s characters face down their demons offers another twist on noir argot. There is no hardboiled badinage, no snappy dame. The extent of the verbal exposition unfolds in flat stretches of narration; the voice seems familiar and almost clinical, though–anything but omniscient. In a way, the effect virtually strips the humanity from the characters’ backstories, mirroring the desaturated visual style that enabled Nikolic to shoot a film noir in broad daylight. “In life, people don’t talk, explaining their motivations,” Nikolic said. “There are certain things that are left unsaid, but you get the general sense of what’s going on. So that was the idea–to make it a little more real. In the end, while there are certain details that are not spelled out, overall, it’s pretty clear what has happened and how the story drives.”
For the next two weeks, anyway, the story drives in the East Village. From there, Nikolic and producer Jim Browne head into the treacherous straits of self-distribution. But reaction–from The Times on down to, well, me, I guess–favors a strong showing, and you can sense Nikolic is ready for it. “We’re finishing the same way we started–completely independent,” he told me. “It’s people who really care a lot about their films. It’s totally a personal thing, where you literally go from theater to theater, talk to the owners. Hopefully, we’ll get it onto video and then move on to the next one.”

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