The protagonist arrives at a village to investigate happiness, and then the viewer, like the journalist, encounters the small but growing tension between the musicality of the narrative and the real circumstances of Yugoslavia. Indeed, a post-socialist re-reading leads me to recognise myself as an ethnographer of useless romanticism through the state models of the past. I love lighting matches in the twilight of the dark pre-war cultural layers and contexts of the former Yugoslavia of 1974.

And the adventure begins with the subtitles of the film, which at that time standardised its linguistic currency in Serbo-Croatian. But today, in 2025, do I choose Serbian, with the Cyrillic alphabet, or Croatian, with the Latin alphabet? And I am well aware that in doing so I am discriminating against the ideological orientations of the countries that separated from Yugoslavia.

On the other hand, the director here not only opted for the false place name Predojeva for the village, to avoid difficulties with Tito and to situate the plot with more critical elasticity towards the socialist experiment that had all the glamour of a Siberian winter afternoon, but also took the trouble to invent a little song: ‘Predojeva, predojeva, you live there without problems’. Sedmak is welcomed with open arms, both by the waitresses and some students like Anicka, whose eyes sparkle as they fantasise about the newcomer, and by Zeljna, the wife of Tasa, the comrade who has invited him to stay at his own home, where he meets the beautiful woman. The film has a light-hearted tone, almost at the level of a B movie, and in a nutshell, what the viewer will see – and it is not happiness among the inhabitants of the place – is the transparent and indistinguishable boundary between the lies told to strangers and the imposture of the social and identity imaginary opposed to the bonanza and social prosperity touted by the Yugoslav state. But in fact, he himself will be seduced by the flexibility of skirting around the friendly moral code of the environment. Indeed, you were right if you thought that Sedmak would slowly be affected by the provincial milieu.

You can feel a gradual change in the journalist, who arrives almost stuttering from his taciturn and shy nature, but as he becomes entangled – against his will at first, it is true – in the flirtations of Tasa’s wife and, simultaneously, later with Anicka, who in fact knows or senses his infidelity, there is no turning back, although fortunately for the viewer he continues with his report. I say fortunately because some of the night scenes in the cabaret-style pub are brutally honest about the breeding ground of dissatisfied people in the village, but almost everyone, especially Tasa, the husband who on at least two occasions is seconds away from catching his wife with Sedmak, plays the comedy of happy stability. it is never clear – and it really doesn’t matter at such a level of hypocrisy – whether he actually notices first in the pub and then in another scene in the bathtub and pretends not to notice. In the end, the waitress from the beginning, who seemed the most crazy, was the most sane, at least in her genuine feelings, and she gives Sedmak a hug, saying, ‘The world is upside down. It always brings the wrong people together.’ Sedmak receives acceptance from the university to teach there, and in the last scene, he confirms what the waitress said. The phone rings, Sedmak is living with Anicka and receives a call telling him he’s a father; he even hears the baby crying on the other end.