Sarajevo Best Actress winner Eva Kostić captivates in this unflinching portrait of peer pressure and sexual shame by first time writer-director Kosara Mitić.
From the first frame, Kosara Mitić’s “17” refuses to pull any punches, plunging us immediately into the traumatic moment when a hookup between high-school student Sara (Eva Kostić) and two boys takes a violent turn. From here, this nervy teen drama from Macedonia picks up several months later and follows the withdrawn Sara over the first two days of a class trip to Greece, where one of her assailants is among the unruly group of youngsters. Winner of the Best Actress prize at Sarajevo after premiering in the Berlinale’s Perspectives section, the film has a bleak, unflinching gaze that sometimes skims the edges of shock-value miserablism. In the end, however, Mitić’s intrepid approach is undeniably bracing, and held together at its core by Kostić’s simmering performance.
In the most superficial sense, “17” resembles one of this year’s more auspicious festival breakouts “La Gradiva”: Both follow a raucous senior class to a foreign country and in the process unearth dark truths about the gang via restlessly fluid camerawork that, in extended close-ups, mercilessly lays bare its protagonist’s anxieties. Also partly filled with nonprofessional young actors, Mitić’s hair-raising debut makes that French first feature look sunny by comparison. There’s a practical reason for this darkness beyond the obvious Eastern European somberness: The first day of the trip, and the bulk of the film, takes place in a stopover hotel in Bitola that cinematographer Naum Doksevski casts in dim jaundiced lights and long shadows.
When the group arrives by bus, Sara is a conspicuously surly presence in her baggy sweatshirt and dragging jeans; her classmates, brusque, yappy, and shockingly entitled as they constantly talk back to their two teacher-chaperones, both grossly resigned to their students’ insolence. Denied the private room she paid double for because of a mix-up by hotel management, Sara must room with her guileless, overly eager friend Lina (Martina Danilovska) and her cool-girl ex bestie Nina (Eva Stojcevska). Nina is now dating the apish Filip (Dame Joveski), Sara’s ex and one of her rapists — unbeknownst to everyone, of course.
By teasing out the dynamics between Sara, her classmates and her teachers, the script by Mitić and Ognjen Sviličić highlights a culture of shame and straight masculine privilege; a don’t-ask-don’t-tell world where girls, especially, are peer-pressured to party and surrender their bodies to (often brutal) male whims. Worse yet, in these girls’ heads, is the slut-shaming and bullying that would ensue should this cruel code of silence be broken.
And so, there’s a reason Sara is cagey, though Kostić’s remarkable breakout performance adds to this frayed reticence a coiled rage that comes out each time she lays eyes on Filip. That explodes into action in one startlingly seedy scene involving a rape in full view of revelers at a hotel party. When a hotel worker gets a beating from the sociopathic Filip and his juiced-up cronies, this sadism pushes the limits of credulity, though a comment from a teacher — that the kids better behave in Greece, a civilized country with real rules — reveals that Mitić might somewhat be thinking in metaphors.
In any case, it’s not just that Sara, whose terrible secret is concealed by the straps cinched around her rounded belly, feels dirtied and disgraced; there are layers to her knowing gaze. A smirk she gives to Nina, who chalks up Sara’s bad attitude to jealousy over Filip, conveys the pity of a veteran soldier talking down to a fresh recruit.
But because Sara is indeed only 17, wisdom is tempered by a quivering vulnerability as the reality of her pregnancy presses upon her, body and soul, forcing her to open up to Lina and discover the possibility of solidarity. Along with a brief moment of tenderness Sara experiences with her class’s resident dork, this feminine camaraderie makes for a nugget of niceness in a sea of despair. And at a border control checkpoint, a symbolic crossroads if there ever was one, Mitic has Sara decide in a bracing, breath-held final scene: Bury her truth at all costs or embrace it, haters be damned.
