To clean up the image of a Balkan leader, a director “resurrects” Kevin Spacey

A hagiographic film about the stiff ex-leader of a small Balkan country was never going to be a worldwide box-office hit. But its director, a former water polo champion turned right-wing Croatian cinema darling, has found a new way to do it generate expectation: Cast Kevin Spacey as the lead.

Though Hollywood has turned its back on Spacey over allegations of sexual assault against him, removing the 63-year-old actor from its bankable talent list and from already ongoing productions, a new film tribute to a nationalist leader what some consider to be a dangerous fanatic brings the ‘House of Cards’ star to the fore.

The 90-minute film pays homage to the first president of CroatiaFranjo Tudjman, revered by his followers as a Balkan George Washington but reviled by his enemies as a fanatical ethnonationalist. The film, “Once Upon a Time in Croatia”will be released in Croatia in February and will be screened in other countries, including the United States.

Director, Yakov Sedlar70 years old, acknowledged in an interview that many people in Croatia, especially young people, They don’t care much about Tudjmana highly controversial authority figure that historian Tony Judt has defined as “one of the least attractive leaders” Built in the early 1990s from the rubble of Yugoslavia, which Croatia was once a part of.

Warren Zimmerman, the US ambassador to Yugoslavia when the multi-ethnic country fell apart, warned in a cable to Washington in 1992 that Tudjman’s election as Croatian president in May 1990 had brought to power “a narrow-minded crypto-racist regime” who, together with the Serbian Slobodan Milosevic, unleashed “nationalism, the killer of the Balkans”.

But counting on Spacey to play Tudjman, the director said last week in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, it will definitely “help” to break the wall of what is at best public indifference and at worst fierce hostility towards the man who led Croatia’s struggle for independence.

Spacey, a hook

“If you ask people if they’ve heard of Spacey or Tudjman, of course they’ll say Spacey,” he said. The American actor’s fame, beyond the risk of discredit, and his indisputable acting talent, added Sedlar, “undoubtedly it will attract people to see my film on Tudjman”.

The director stated that Tudjman, who died in 1999, “was not a nationalist, but a patriotan absolutely positive personality.” And Spacey, winner of two Oscars and a friend of the director for more than a decade, “he’s the best of the best actors” and “utterly innocent,” Sedlar said.

Both, Sedlar said, were unjustly maligned: Spacey from accusers including Anthony Rapp, an actor whose assault suit against the disgraced star was dismissed in October in a New York civil court, and Tudjman from domestic political rivals and foreign critics angry over his role in the bloody destruction of Yugoslavia.

Croatia, one of the seven states that emerged after the breakup of Yugoslaviait is today a stable democracy of less than 4 million inhabitants, a popular tourist destination and a football powerhouse world.

But the struggle to shape the history of the Yugoslav wars, decisive for the national identity of each of the countries generated by the violence of the early 1990scontinues to have a strong presence in the regionespecially among filmmakers from Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, the nations that have suffered the worst fighting.

“The history of war is a constant process of remembering and forgetting,” said Dejan Jovic, a professor at the University of Zagreb. The memory wars, he added, are particularly active in cinema. Each team, Jovic said, “only remembers what it wants and forgets the rest.”

Sedlar’s new film does little effort for offering a complete and balanced story. Avoid all mention of the crimes committed under Tudjman’s leadershipsuch as the attacks on Bosnian civilians, ethnic cleansing of Croatia’s once large Serb minority and the destruction of a 16th-century bridge in the Bosnian city of Mostar in 1993.

It ignores his rapprochement with hardline nationalists linked during World War II to the Ustashe, a fascist group whose brutality even shocked some German Nazis.

But the director insisted: “This is not propaganda. It’s just my point of view“.

Croatia, almost ethnically homogeneous due to the violence of the 90s that expelled many Serbs and members of other minoritieshas largely surpassed the narrow ethnonationalism of Tudjman’s time and has become member of the European Union and NATO.

While Sedlar was promoting his film, the government was focusing on preparing the country adopt the euro and enter the Schengen border-free area on 1 January.

The government, although led by the political party founded by Tujdman, he wanted nothing to do with the film of Sedlar and rejected requests for funding. The director said he raised the needed 400,000 euros from private donors.

He originally hoped to make a full-scale biopic to mark the centenary of the former Croatian president’s birth. But he settled for a more modest production based on Tudjman’s moving speeches played by Spacey.

The director said the actor accepted the role out of friendship and more he had neither requested nor received any payment. Spacey’s attorney, Jennifer L. Keller, did not respond to a request for comment.

The return of Kevin Spacey?

Whether Tudjman’s role will help Spacey rehabilitate that’s another topic. It’s not his first acting role since allegations surfaced against him in 2017 – he’s appeared as a detective in an Italian feature film and as a mysterious henchman in an American thriller – but his role as Tudjman It is perhaps the riskiest.

Laura Silber, author of “Yugoslavia: The Death of a Nation,” said she was puzzled anyone would want to be associated with a tribute to the former Croatian leader. She had met him several times while covering the Yugoslav wars as a journalist and I found it “repulsive”a shameless fanatic with a “superiority complex” who “couldn’t control his dislike of Muslims”, the largest ethnic group in neighboring Bosnia.

“It was like a mixture of Dr. Strangelove with Adolf Hitler“, to remember.

Tudjman had fought against fascism during World War II, joining the communist partisans against Hitler’s puppet regime. But in the 1990s he refused to condemn the Ustachist legacy and got independent Croatia to adopt a coat of arms in the shape of a red and white checkerboard, used for centuries by ethnic Croatians, but very similar to the Ustachist symbol.

Sedlar, which has been for years Tudjman Cultural Attaché in New York, presents himself as a calm and reasonable man, totally free from violent rhetoric and often racist which gave Croatian nationalism such a bad reputation. But he does not admit criticism of Tudjman.

“Compared to his creation of an independent Croatian nation, everything else is absolutely irrelevant,” Sedlar said, adding: “Without Tudjman, independent Croatia would not exist“.

Vesna Skare-Ozbolt, an admirer of the former president who served in his office as a consultant from 1991 until his death from cancer, insisted that while Tudjman, a former Communist general in the Yugoslav army, had some traits of unattractive personalities, “deserves a movie.”

“He is the father of the nation,” he said. “He did a great job.”

Spacey’s performance in the film, which includes archive footage of Tudjman giving wartime speeches in Croatian, consists largely of Spacey making the same speeches in Englishwalking past government buildings in white-soled trainers and scribbling a book.

Reviews from Croatian critics were divided along political lines, although even the most hostile praised Spacey’s performance.

One of them called the film “trash” but described Spacey as “pretty much the best of the movie”adding, “I had a difficult task: to recite verbal sausages from Tudjman’s best-known speeches in English and give them some passion without a clear context.”

Despite his legal win in New York, Spacey still faces serious legal trouble in Britain, where he will go on trial this year on sexual assault charges. He pleaded not guilty.

The story jury is still out on Tudjman, and Silber, a former war correspondent, said a clear verdict was unlikely to be reached any time soon, even if not in Croatia.

“Croatia will never be judged by history, because it was the architect of its independence,” he said.

c.2023 The New York Times Society

Translation: Elisa Carnelli