New Year and a movie review of Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day

Happy New Year! I spent mine watching the extended cut of the second Harry Potter movie lmfao. My husband began playing Hogwarts Legacy which got him reminiscing about the movies so for the following two weeks we'll be watching half a movie a day...

2025 was a pretty good year overall, but somehow the thing that stuck with me the most was me realizing my feet have grown for half a centimeter. Seriously how does that happen at age 27? I thought maybe my arch flattened (but it hasn't), or it has something to do with me starting to run, but they were already at this size when I was just buying my running shoes so... They also didn't get wider, as that's usually what people experience when older. It's a curious thing! They went from being 25.5cm to 26cm exactly, as if they weren't big enough... It's freaky, really, and I have to replace a good portion of my shoe rack. Yea, 2025, the year my feet grew!!! That's how I'll sum up this year.

In other news, I watched a few movies recently. One of them being Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day, a pretty new Croatian movie set during the 1950s in Yugoslavia - following a group of gay male friends and former partisans that are now filmmakers being sabotaged for some reason or the other. There's... a lot to say about this movie. First of all, it doesn't feel like it was created for a Croatian audience. Especially the fact that the song that gets the most attention is Bella Ciao, no I'm not kidding. I'm pretty certain Yugoslavia had no lack of partisan love songs lmfao.

The movie took a weird and shallow anti Yugoslavia, no, anti working class stance that I've never seen before. There's a weird air of glorifying the former bourgeoisie and putting down the working class in multiple scenes, like implying all of the working class people in the positions of power are dumb and low iq, the main villain is a former tailor turned minister (haha get it like Tito was a locksmith), the only other spiteful and evil human in the movie is a single mother that's a factory worker, the family of one of the gay dudes that comes from the village is super anti gay... It's kind of insane actually lmao. Meanwhile we have the former Zagreb elite family consisting of a high brow HNK (our most prestigious theatre) actress that is very accepting of her gay son #woke #influencedbythewest, a former director of a factory who built it from the ground up #capitalistking but is now forced to work in le stock office, and of top of it all they were forced to take roommates assigned to them by the government in their massive homes seized by the state. Would somebody PLEASE think of the rich!!!

I really don't mind criticism of Yugoslavia. But this was so biased it felt like a caricature...

The most controversial parts of the movie were really the sex scenes, which were just straight up very stereotypical gay porn, dick and balls with no lube just spit and all. I'm ngl, it was a bit funny watching it in the cinema LMAO. I'll give the movie one thing, the male actors having sex weren't complete uggos so at least my eyes weren't assaulted to the max but it was still an experience. There were too many sex scenes and I'm no pearl clutcher.

Speaking of sex scenes, the movie starts with a really graphic one, and then we get shown our 4 gay besties friend group during their university days directly before ww2, and how they bravely stood up to da nazis while they were rounding up DA JOOS AND DA SERBS with the characters repeating that about 50 times so that we get the message. Jesus the cringe I felt during that whole scene... 0 nuance, 0 subtlety.

The rest of the movie tells us a story that happens after ww2, once their war glory starts to run out. Some bigshot wants to take the position of a deputy minister or something along those lines, and the deputy minister is a former professor of the gay filmmaker guys and he's helping them stay safe and letting them get away with risque movies with his influence, so the logical course of action is to incriminate the professor by exposing the gays and their degeneracy to the public. To help him with the execution of the plan he implants a propagandist in their film studio to make sure that the movies they're producing are properly censored, while the propagandist has to somehow set them up for failure or sabotage them. Our protagonists manage to make a proper propaganda movie though, so the propagandist drastically decides to set up their storage on fire, almost killing himself in the act. The grindr guardians end up saving him which plants the seeds of "gays might be human after all..." into the propagandist.

The rest of the movie is pretty cliche, they end up getting closer with the propagandist, foolishly record themselves doing gay shit, the secret agency gets their hands on the gay shit (by employing a gay spy. yeah.), they end up getting sent to the work camp/prison on Goli Otok where they're violated, starved, raped, abused etc. The propagandist makes up a plan to save them, they manage to jump off the island and the story ends. In the end the only character that really receives a catharsis or any type of emotional growth is the propagandist.

The sheer weirdness of this movie made me check it out a bit more than just imdb and letterboxd (which btw, both have ONLY extremely positive reviews, what the fuck?), and I found out that actually this wasn't supposed to be a movie about the gays in Yugoslavia. It was supposed to be a movie about a group of gay men during our war of independence in the 90s. BUUUUT since most of our movies have to receive massive fundings from the government to be made, a certain mega conservative nationalist party (funded by larger european and american conservative networks, so much about fighting against foreign influence!) protested against the movie being made. So the director, ironically, succumbed to the censoring and has decided to make the movie about the evil communist regime instead.

This got me wondering. First of all, what does this say about the conservative party that is usually vocally against homosexuality? They actually don't mind gay stories that have intense gay sex scenes in them - if their setting criticizes Yugoslavia and the working class and coddles the elite (even if the elite are portrayed as american liberals for some reason). They do mind it if the setting criticizes our strong, catholic manly war veterans though. Interesting! But what about the director? I honestly have a hard time telling whether the whole propaganda story within the movie was meant to be a cheeky diss at the real life event around this movie or whether the director really ate shit and kneeled to the censoring in a modern democratic freeze speach country that is definitely so much better than Yugoslavia. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Much to think about...

After some digging, I also found this review that raises some of the same questions I did and goes into the plot in more depth while pointing out a lot of the innacuracies if you're interested, but you'd have to google translate it. All in all, I'd say the background of the movie made it unironically a lot more thonk provoking than it was until then, but I still can't say I enjoyed it. It felt like it was covered by a strange veneer to make it more palatable to western audiences and it really lacked nuance.

I also watched Dinner in America finally, but I'll save that for another entry because wow, this turned out longer than expected!