Falling in love is a risk, declaring that love requires courage, but finding the freedom to express that most vulnerable of emotions can be difficult when you’ve spent your life in hiding. Blerta Zeqiri’s “The Marriage” — selected by Kosovo as their official Oscar entry this year — may be marketed as an “LGBT Love Triangle Drama” (as my PR email subject line screamed) but it’s a misleading reduction of this complex drama. Suffused with an aura of loss, and longings that are only as quickly fulfilled as they are painfully obliterated, “The Marriage” is a tragedy in slow-motion, as three lives are haunted by a past that can’t be changed, and a future that is unalterably compromised.
As the film begins, the aftermath of the Kosovo War of 1998-99 looms large, as Bekim (Alban Ukaj) journeys with his fiancee Anita (Adriana Matoshi) to the Serbian border, as she hopes to retrieve whatever remains there might be of her parents. This is not the first trip she’s made, and Anita will leave without the closure she seeks, her parents once again unaccounted for among the body parts, zipped up in bags, left on the cold ground under a hastily assembled tarp, and that sense of unfinished business only intensifies with arrival of Nol (Genc Salihu). Rakishly handsome, brimming with an artist’s spirit, and returning from France where he’s been living as a successful musician, Nol is presented as an old friend of Bekim’s. However, it doesn’t take much to notice that the history between them runs much deeper and won’t be tidily revisited over the course of one evening of drinks.
Carefully penned by Zeqiri and Keka Kreshnik Berisha, the pair navigates a handful of storytelling tropes that could so easily be wrong-footed and slip into cliché. Through a series of drunken evenings out, along with some judiciously placed flashback sequences, we simultaneously learn about the shared passion that Bekim and Nol must confront, while also understanding how much marriage means not just for Anita, but for everyone connected to the union, who place upon her and the event, the unspoken pressure of starting a new chapter in lives marked by trauma. Bekim and Nol were lucky, managing to evade military service during the war, which in turn only intensified their secret passion. “The Marriage” never unfurls these revelations in expected ways, nor is it interested in treating Bekim and Nol’s relationship as a “truth bomb” to drop on the unsuspecting characters around them.
Instead, Zeqiri and Berisha are more concerned with the societal forces that have forever forced a wedge between Bekim and Nol. During the opening frames of the picture, a stranger, upon learning of Bekim and Anita’s upcoming matrimony, implores them to have many children. Bekim’s mother has anointed Anita as the daughter she never had. The marriage is seen as a balm to the post-war fog that is just as chilly as the wintry months through which most of the film is set. There is also the general pervasiveness of homophobia among Kosovan society, a factor which further pushes Bekim, the reluctant half of the pair, to keep his forbidden relationship under wraps, while Nol pines for a life in the far more tolerant France.
However, Nol’s seemingly rational arguments are a fantasy, even as they are borne from real pain. The sacrifices Bekim would face to pursue a passion that has endured years and miles, are multifaceted, as are the potential consequences. If there is a misstep the film takes, it’s in underwriting Nol, turning him into a spurned lover, rather than someone who is also measuring the outcome of his future at a critical juncture. Anita becomes somewhat of a dramatic pawn around which Bekim and Nol orbit, though perhaps, she is willfully blind to what the audience sees right in front of their eyes. Indeed, Bekim himself chooses a path that favors pragmatism over passion. In this sense, “The Marriage” shares echoes of E.M. Forster’s “Maurice,” in which another couple finds the pressures and expectations of the outside world making an unfair claim on the feelings in front of them. While Forster provides a resolution, “The Marriage” intriguingly leaves a true conclusion up in the air, suggesting — perhaps not unlike “Call Me By Your Name” — that Bekim and Nol’s names will forever be echoing literally or figuratively across miles and miles.
Lensed with an understated and surprising gracefulness by Sevdije Kastrati (though the hurried fast-cut editing in some sequences by Berisha nearly undermines some of the drama), and helmed with a raw inquisitiveness by Zeqiri, “The Marriage” is both sensitively drawn and told. It knows that courage isn’t always a matter of conviction, nor love a sensation that can simply be followed, but believes that nonetheless, true desire is a flame that burns bright even through the haunted shroud of the past. [B]