Possibility of Paradise (2024) ‘Venice’ Movie Review: An Elliptical, Challenging Patchwork of Episodes

Mladen Kovačević’s “Possibility of Paradise” bobs with discovery and exploration. This is filmmaking that resists stratifications and simple routes of association-making. Characters aren’t given precedence. More accurately, the subjects, people we encounter, aren’t granted a sustained deep dive. A familiarization is deliberately halted. We meet them amidst certain moments without the presence of any introduction. Quickly, the film hurtles ahead, changing tacks to a new bunch, a new circumstance.

This approach may be frustrating if one keenly comes to the film with predictable expectations of the documentary and how it should progress into a new area. Those must be expelled immediately the moment the film opens. Kovačević isn’t remotely bothered about stringing scenes into a definite, clearly indicative graph. Disappointment is inevitable if you let yourself be caught up in the tangle of clean, neat trajectory to the film’s unraveling. The film unfurls with steady confidence and a constant curiosity for unexpected interventions. The thrill emanates once you allow the film to absorb you in its rich, intriguing path. There has to be an openness to let the movie pivot you wherever it wishes to.

The film opens with a bunch of schoolgirls cleaning their classroom and then at play. Swiftly, the next section arrives, swooping on a woman who plans to build a villa. She’s new to Bali, the island where the film is set. An interplay between the native and the foreigner is subtly present. All sorts of threads start opening up. They would be seen as diversions, but they are vested with centrality in this film.

So, stories and tangents of dancers and cleaners rub shoulders with heartbreak and deception. Suddenly, there’s an elliptical shift in tracks when the film inserts a sequence of a masked woman strip-dancing, cast in a glow of red light. This also becomes one of the spare examples in the movie, where we get a sense of the dancer as a person on the cusp of change.

Possibility of Paradise (2024) Movie — A still from “Possibility of Paradise” (2024).

Enigma lights up this film. It takes up a positioning that is firmly pitted against discrete, contained narratives. There’s something incredibly daring and defiant in the way it spreads out. It’s untethered, sprawling, and yet fascinatingly attendant to setting expats in Bali as its locus. It scatters itself out among disparate strands without coming off as too loose and bitty.

The disjointedness never becomes bothersome because the film has a concentrated sense of composition despite a wandering structure. Moreover, it’s a real triumph of the movie in accomplishing a telling weave among the many tracks without wildly spiraling into an unfocused lump. Kovačević has an eye for tapping the mundane while situating a string of brief episodes. It’s almost like a series of visitations to regular sights and scenes.

Dramatic tension never feels like a prerequisite, yet the film exerts a strange, mysterious flow. You sway with the movie on the currents of its truthfulness, its confidence to just be without amping up forced associations. There are punctuations of genuine poignance, like when a woman talks of her being swindled out of all her savings right after reposing a just-healing trust in a lover. How does one rebuild one’s life after such an incident? Perhaps it’s revealing that the choice of divers is affected by the concluding digression/central moment. One keeps plunging into the kernel of life, hoping to dig out something fresh and invigorating, something that will keep one going, even if it’s for a brief while.