Slovenka (Damjan Kozole, 2009): Slovenia, Germany, Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia

Reviewed by Charles Hedrick. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

“Slovenka“, also known as “Slovenian Girl“, was an interesting film, which had good acting, good cinematography, but it had a muddled story line where no lesson was learned in the end, and the characters never seemed to develop to anything more then what they were at the beginning of the film. This lack of character development was the only truly detrimental aspect of “Slovenian Girl“, however this is a truly massive detriment.

“Slovenian Girl” is the story of a girl named Aleksandra, who is a student from a small town called Ljubljana, she attends school in the larger neighboring city. However while she is not attending school Aleksandra works as a prostitute, so that she can pay for her nice new apartment. Her life is heading in the direction that she wants it to be going in, however one day one of her clients die of a heart attack. After this event Aleksandra struggles with the aftermath of this clients death, because a lot of attention is drawn to her alias of Slovenian Girl, and she becomes very paranoid that someone might discover her secret identity and discover that she is the Slovenian Girl.

This may sound like an interesting plot line, but it is spoiled by the lack of character development, and the incredibly lackluster ending. However, while there was no character development, the acting was well executed, and believable. Especially the main character Aleksandra (played by Nina Ivanisin), I completely believed that her character could have been a real person.

Another negative aspect of this film was that there was no lesson learned from the experiences of the characters. Meaning that there was no solution to the problems which Aleksandra faced in the film, and they were just left unresolved. For instance, the issue which was caused by the death of one of her clients was never resolved. The film ended with many unresolved issues such as this.

One positive aspect of this film that is definitely worth mentioning was the good cinematography. One example of the good cinematography would be all the scenes involving the scenes where Aleksandra is riding on the train. The way that the angles, the color, and the country side, which you can see through the train window, all compliment each other was very impressive and was very beautiful at times.

So while “Slovenian Girl” may have been an interesting idea, the lack of character development, the lackluster ending, and the massive amount of unresolved issues made this film rather frustrating at times. However with the superior performance from the actors and actresses in this film, and the nice cinematography makes this film highly enjoyable at times. So the bottom line is that if you are okay with some plot holes, and characters that never develop (but this might be okay, because the actors make it possible to enjoy watching the same character for a long period of time), then I suggest seeing this movie for the great acting, and good cinematography.