An interview with Rajko Grlic, Portal Analitika

A retrospective of the films of one of the most important Yugoslav and Croatian film directors, Rajko
Grlic, took place in Belgrade Dom Omladine in early June. Grlics films I am going to quote Ruth
Bradley, an American film critic usually deal with love, sex, revolution, war and other logical things.
My films Rajko Grlic tells Portal Analitika, simply speak about living people. The former participant in
the student protests of 68. and the director of cult films The Melody Haunts My Memory, In the Jaws
of Life, Charuga, Three for Happiness, The Border Post speaking of the last years premiere of his film,
Just Between Us, said that, after so many years, he still returned to the place from which he stared to
tell his film stories: to the streets, flats and beds of Zagreb.
The only thing that man can change today is his partner in bed, Rajko Grlic explains. That is the sole
kind of rebellion we are left with. When he opened the Belgrade retrospective, Grlic recalled that
exactly thirty years have passed since the film The Melody Haunts My Memory was shown for the first
time in former Yugoslavia, starring the unforgettable Miki Manojlovic and Vladica Milosavljevic. And the
famous song by Ivo Robic.
Thirty years! Were getting old! The interview with Rajko Grlic took place on one hot June morning in the
garden of possibly not the prettiest, but certainly the fanciest Belgrade hotel, which, despite time
passed and the general disastrous situation, is still doing fine. In that Hotel Majestic, people say, the
great Croatian and Yugoslav writer, Miroslav Krleza, used to stay. Unfortunately, I am already that old
Grlic says, so I can tell you that I used to come to Majestic in the time when you could see Miroslav
Krleza there.
Have you met Miroslav Krleza?
Yes. Ljuba Tadic, Mladen Budiscak and I have once talked to Krleza for more than five hours. We wanted
to do a film adaptation of his drama On the Edge of Reason. Even though that did not happen, to meet
Krleza was unforgettable. He was telling us the story of a drama which he had not written yet, and which
would take place on Petrovaradin, in the last night of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; and he was telling it,
so to say, word by word, which was the reason why it had lasted so long. My God I thought, can it be
that this man tells stories better than he writes?!