BLACK NIGHTS 2024 Baltic Film Competition
Review: The Southern Chronicles
by Olivia Popp
- Ignas Miškinis’s film tells a charming coming-of-age tale about a working-class boy navigating love and societal expectations in the early years of Lithuania’s independence
It’s the early 1990s, and independent Lithuania is in its infancy just as Ignas Miškinis’s protagonist in The Southern Chronicles [+see also:
interview: Ignas Miškinis
film profile], Rimantas (Džiugas Grinys), is coming of age in the Lithuanian town (or now, the country’s fourth-largest city) of Šiauliai. The Southern Chronicles, with a script by Eglė Vertelytė, is based on a semi-autobiographical book by Rimantas Kmita – and the film’s winding, novel-esque narrative calls to mind stories like The Catcher in the Rye, where the lessons learned along the way make up the story’s true impact. The Lithuanian-Estonian co-production, whose cinematic setting feels like a glossy version of the post-Soviet 1990s, also scooped the top prize in the Tallinn Black Nights Baltic Film Competition (see the news).
Brawny 17-year-old Rimantas, who serves as our voice-over narrator for this story, would rather play rugby than finish his final year of secondary education, spending time with his friend Mindė (Robertas Petraitis) cooking up side hustles for extra cash. The teen from a working-class family soon strikes up a relationship with Monika (Digna Kulionytė), a much wealthier, upper-middle-class teenager; to impress her, he begins to read books (an activity he once scorned) and, in a surprising turn of events, begins excelling in school and inadvertently takes a tremendous liking to reading and writing poetry. His relationship with Monika begins as a sort of Romeo-and-Juliet story that peters out into real life, and he also meets the exuberant but more tomboy-ish Jurga (Irena Sikorskytė) at a New Year's party, naïvely calling her his “plan B” girlfriend. As the title suggests, The Southern Chronicles traverses a series of “eras” – the highs and lows of Rimantas’s year – without much directionality, taking after a more literary form.
Grinys, named one of European Film Promotion’s European Shooting Stars (see our interview), isn’t granted this sort of gritty material of a teen growing up in a post-industrial town to work off of. Rimantas is also not particularly graceful or sweet-talking – but thankfully, this doesn’t make him an insufferable hero. Instead, Grinys plays the role with such a likeability that you can’t help but root for him (in an early scene, all he can think of to offer the girl at his house is a glass of juice), striking a balance between loveable doofus, young man trying to navigate society’s complex frameworks for masculinity, and what the internet might call a “softboi” in his emotional demeanour and love for the poetic form.
Everything in Miškinis’s film is hyperbolised, from the costumes and haircuts (the teenage characters all look older than their actual ages, while Rimantas sports a hilarious, tightly trimmed flattop hairstyle and is lightly balding at the top) to the needle-drops of Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam” and MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This”, among others. However, at times, the film relies too heavily on the soundtrack to evoke style, leaning into clichéd territory. And while the visual style and grey-ish colour grading intending to convey the decade are also not particularly gripping, the mise-en-scène elements taken together are guaranteed to evoke nostalgia for the period. The party scenes, which incorporate footage actually filmed during the era, have the most character, while Miškinis does his best to emulate the spontaneous feel of taped home videos.
Despite its component parts never individually impressing by themselves, the film's charm begins to genuinely increase at the film’s halfway point, where viewers will begin to actively cheer for Rimantas’s success – whatever that might look like in the next moment. By the end, the ways in which the well-meaning young man finds ways to entertain himself in a stereotypically drab environment, all while making the best of some tougher situations, grows to a fever pitch through the touching last scene.
The Southern Chronicles is a Lithuanian-Estonian production by iN SCRiPT and Nafta Films.
