The High Sun

The High Sun is a trilogy in which the same two actors play romantic leads in separate stories a decade apart, their lives paralyzed by the Serbian-Croatian war. The structure harkens back to the magazine anthology film in early Italian neorealism.

In 1991 the girl’s brother refuses to let her marry her lover from the other side. He forcibly returns her from their planned escape to the city. When the lover gives chase he’s held at the border. In the ensuing scuffle the lover is shot dead. The girl is unconsolable, her brother shocked at the death he did not even in his rage intend. 

In 2001 the buildings are ruined from the bombings. A mother and daughter return from the city to their battered house and hire a young man to rebuild it. Again the tensions between the enemy sides persist. The social ruin outlives the physical. 

The mother and boy deliberately set that gap aside to get on with their lives. But the girl freezes him out, because his side killed her brother. She attacks her mother for accepting him. Sensing her prejudice the boy turns on the girl: “Am I to blame for his death?” Besides: her side killed his father. 

Typical of the film’s attention to telling detail, a pearl of sweat runs down the girl’s nape as she watches the boy work and is attracted. Chastened by his scolding, on his last day of the job she initiates a passionate round of sex. This commits him to her but she shuts him out: “That’s it then.” 

He’s off to a big job in the city, but in parting he causes her second thoughts when he generously gives her mother back his salary. “You’re moving here. You’ll need this.” Re-won by this generosity, the girl wistfully watches him disappear from her life. This love was a casualty of the war hatreds that live on among the ruined buildings and lives.   

Long after the war, in 2001 a young man returns from university in the city for a big summer party. As we learn, at his mother’s insistence he abandoned his pregnant Serbian girlfriend to go to school. He still resents his parents for encouraging that stance. When he visits the girl and sees her little son he regrets it even more. His former lover freezes him out altogether — an extension of the post-coital freeze in the second episode.  

The boy tries to lose himself in the booze, drug and sex orgy on the beach. A swim seems to bring him back to his senses. He leaves the girl and goes back to his former lover’s house. When she doesn’t answer his knocks he sits on the stoop and waits. She comes out, sits beside him, both mute, then arises and goes back into her house. She leaves the door open.  We don’t know if he’ll go in, but whatever happens their love is gone. The silent open door expresses resignation not their old passion, which was a fatal casualty of the prejudice and cowardice of the war. 

In all three stories the city is a distant escape, as if the war and its effects could be escaped anywhere geographic. The landscape is studded with the wounds and destruction of war. But as man and his constructions pass, the larger rhythms of life persist, especially the cycle of love and loss and the rhythms of nature. Hence the river figures in each episode, the fields, and a silent dog that is witness to all three tragedies.