Rondo
Roundabout
1966 · Yugoslavia · 96 min
- Director
- Zvonimir Berković
- Screenplay
- Zvonimir Berković
- Music
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- Cinematography
- Tomislav Pinter
Cast
What it is about
One Sunday, the lonely judge Mladen visits his friend Fedja, a sculptor, for the chess game they play every week. There he meets Fedja's wife Neda and quickly becomes drawn to her. Across afternoons of chess, dinners and conversations about music and love, the three draw closer, and the bond between them grows increasingly delicate and strained.
How it was made
It was the first feature-length film by Zvonimir Berković, a former musician and screenwriter of H-8, a Croatian classic of the 1950s. As in that earlier film, the director uses a musical form as the narrative structure: the basic situation, a Sunday chess afternoon, recurs with small variations, while a Mozart rondo runs through the soundtrack. Shot in Zagreb in a cosy middle-class setting, the film adopts a formal, intimate style that broke with earlier Yugoslav cinema and brought the aesthetics of the modernist psychological novel to Croatian film. The cinematography is by Tomislav Pinter.
Reception and legacy
It is considered one of the three great classics of Croatian 1960s modernism. In 1999, a poll of Croatian film critics placed it among the best Croatian films ever made. Milena Dravić won the Silver Arena Award for Best Actress at the 1966 Pula Film Festival for her portrayal of Neda.
Stills
Trivia
A late feature debut
Rondo was Zvonimir Berković's first full-length film. He had previously worked as a musician and as the screenwriter of the acclaimed H-8.
Mozart on the soundtrack
A Mozart rondo is played repeatedly throughout the film and serves as a model for its structure, in which the same scene returns with variations.
Original Cinematopedia text based on Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.