If we are to believe an anecdote told by a shady character in Sorella di Clausura, Ivana Mladenović’s newest film, which has just premiered in the main competition of Locarno, the movie’s title is actually the name of an a cappella group consisting of Italian nuns. The odd thing about them is that, unless they are performing, which happens once a year, they live under a strict vow of silence. According to the popular Serbian folk singer Boban (played by the filmmaker’s father, Miodrag Mladenović, whom we saw in his daughter’s previous film, Ivana the Terrible [+lee también:
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entrevista: Ada Solomon
ficha de la película]), the same destiny awaits our protagonist, Stela (Katia Pascariu, from Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn [+lee también:
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Boban might not know, but Stela has a history with him. He was, and still is, her only crush, celebrity or otherwise, and her obsession with him started when she was 12 and she saw him on TV. That crush and obsession are probably the only things that keep Stela afloat in her sad and depressed existence. She is in her thirties, jobless and lives with her extended family in a cramped flat. The year is 2008, and Romania has just got into the EU, just in time to suffer all of the maladies that came with the global economic crisis.

However, Stela remains steadfast in her intention to get close to Boban, or at least to show her family that she might succeed in life against all odds. The road to both goals runs via a pop singer, Vera (Cendana Trifan), who is rumoured to be Boban’s newest fling, and who takes an interest in Stela’s writing, going by the example of her fan letters. The “rivals” soon become friends, and Stela gets a chance to get ahead in life. However, perks such as contact with renowned publisher Felix (Cătălin Dordea) and a ticket to access “high society” often come with bizarre consequences, like moving to different places in Romania, working as a sex-product tester or having to fake a hook-up with a younger Romani witch-doctor, Gabi (Adrian Radu), to please her hosts.

From Mladenović’s films so far, we have learned that we should expect the unexpected, even though they’re rooted in personal experiences of hers and her friends’. This might be the reason why she opens this one with a disclaimer that we are “wrong and possibly paranoid” if we expect to watch a film based on true events, while the end credits reveal that it is actually based on a memoir by Liliana Pelici. So, the events Stela stumbles through might not be true, exactly, but there are enough references to Mladenović’s (and not only hers) previous works to keep the viewer occupied chasing them, albeit not so many as to lose oneself in them. The film might be dedicated to her late friend and collaborator Anca Pop (the character of Vera seems modelled after her, to a certain extent), but there are also echoes of Radu Jude – not just for the fact that Katia Pascariu plays the same, seemingly mousy, but actually resourceful, type of character as in Bad Luck Banging…, but also because of Vanja Kovačević’s editing and the division into chapters that give an order to the idiosyncratic ideas.

According to Ivana Mladenović, Sorella di Clausura is an “empathetic parody of romantic melodramas”. That notion is valid, but the film examines many more things, from the pursuit of happiness, via the mechanics of obsession, to the imperative of success. Whatever it might be, Sorella di Clausura is unmistakably a film by a director with a strong signature.

Sorella di Clausura is a Romanian-Serbian-Italian-Spanish co-production staged by microFILM and Dunav 84 in co-production with Nightswim and Boogaloo Films. B Rated International handles the international sales.