Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day: it is never clear who the villains are 

REVIEW by Drew Rowsome - Photos courtesy of Capital Motion Pictures
14 May 2025 -

It is the early 1940s when we meet lovers Lovro (Dado Cosic) and Nenad (Djordje Galic). We meet them in bed and then share a few minutes of their idyllic university life. Lovro is tall and lanky with a wry smile, while Nenad is shorter with a hairy chest and sporty pornstache. On their way to class with friends, they are detoured by members of the occupying Nazi party, who attempt to separate all the Jews and Serbs. The students resist and many are gunned down. It is very clear who the villains are. Flashing forward to 1957, the world war is over and Yugoslavia is now under the communist rule of Tito. Lovro is a director of propaganda films that are written by Nenad. Details of their life in an apartment shared with Lovro's parents, his father, Vojislav 'Voja' Brajovic, having had his successful manufacturing business taken over by the state, and his mother, the luminous Anja Sovagovic-Despot who gets far too little screen time, is an actress in the National Theatre which functions as a black market after hours. Lovro and Nenad's relationship is an open secret until they mildly subvert one of the propaganda films. It is no long clear who the villains are.

While Lovro and Nenand's story is the main plotline, their friend and cinematographer Stevan, the hunky Slaven Doslo, is also gay and begins a tentative romance with the equally hunky Zoran, Marco Braic. They meet and compare the scars they earned in the war in a sweetly erotic that turns hot scene. Lavro's ability to live in a glass closet is due to his status as a war hero for his role as a guerrilla partisan against the Nazi occupation. They may chafe against the constraints of life and creating art in a communist regime, there is much tragi-comedy about ration cards and maneuvering around them, but Lavro and Nenad have it better than many. Until their slight subversion comes to the attention of the Agency for Agitation and Propaganda, AGITPROP, who take a very dim view of homosexuality. A mid-level office drone, Emir (Emir Hadzihafizbegovic) is assigned a position as a studio head with the unofficial mission of sabotaging Lavro and Naned's careers. Of rooting out the deviants.

Though Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day is shot in sumptuous black and white mimicking the silver nitrate Hollywood glamour portraiture of the '30s and '40s, the better to enhance the handsome but everyman glow of the actors, there is a sharp contrast between the life of the gays and that of Emir. Particularly the exuberant playful sex and affection between Lavro and Nenad versus the perfunctory, and implied unsatisfactory, sex between Emir and his female housemate. Emir accepts his mission without question but as he watches the film crew and actors at work, his doubts become a second and powerful plotline. That is enough intrigue for a gay-themed backstage film with political overtones, but director Ivona Juka ups the ante with twists and turns. Everyone has an agenda, is a spy, or, worthy of a John le Carré novel, can be bought or blackmailed. No-one can be trusted. The comic undertone disappears as Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day grows serious and seriously disturbing. And the cinematography adapts with it, going from sumptuous to deliberately evocative of the harrowing footage of the Nazi internment camps. Full circle.

Films about the resilience of the artistic and the gay spirit are always welcome and, sadly, still necessary. Lovro, Navad and Stevan suffer brutally and their spiritual reward, an homage to The Wizard of Oz but aquatic, is moving and just short of cathartic. Emir's fate is cathartic and the subtext indicts all despot homophobes. The plotlines are deftly woven together with a metaphor of ghosts and despair linked seamlessly with a horrific event and missing comrade. The sense of loss and waste is heartbreaking. At one point Lovro pushes back and says, "I am what I am, I have only this life,' and the sentiment rings true despite being decades pre-Fierstein. That is what we want Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day to become, a portrait of successful resistance and queer triumph. Alas, reality intrudes and we are forced to reckon with history, and probably the future, where resistance is ongoing and horrific and painful. 

Perhaps that is too much emphasis on plot and thematic concerns, both of which are crystal clear but short of didactic. Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day is also about the power of artistic creation, linked explicitly with the joy of gay sex. Even the propaganda films have a sheen to them. Certainly the actors, all expressive despite wearing societal masks for protection, are stunning even if their physicality is more contemporarily buffed than the time period would suggest. When a group are filmed skinny-dipping joyfully, water as healing is a central metaphor, we not only feel their exuberance but the liberating ecstasy of the cameraman who captures the moment. Even when Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day turns violently brutal and gut-wrenching, religious imagery of suffering rears its conflicted head, captured in excruciatingly exquisite detail. The final images tie us inextricably to the present and reality becomes mundane and fantastical through a simple sleight of cinematography. It is never clear who the villains are.