I have always found it frustrating to articulate queer feelings with other young gay men of ex-Yugoslavian heritage, as even though our languages are mutually intelligible, these conversations almost always occur in English. Our shared tongues seem incapable of adequately expressing emotions which go beyond their staunchly heterosexual borders. I had previously assumed that this might be a modern problem, as younger generations of former-Yugoslavs drift further from their native languages in favour of a more universal English. Upon revisiting ex-Yugoslavia’s early queer cinema, however, I’ve found this phenomenon, which I’ve named ‘linguistic paralysis’, to be an essential fixture of even the region’s most openly queer films.
Fifty years ago, the amateur Slovenian director (and openly homosexual) Stanko Jost confronted this problem in his film Dečki (Boys), the first explicitly gay Yugoslavian film. A film, which until regional voices like those of critics Jasmina Šepetavc and Sebastijan Ozmec brought to light, risked remaining in total obscurity. Set during the 1970s in a Slovenian boarding school, it follows the relationship between roommates Zdenko and Nani as they fall in love. Noted for borrowing earlier tropes from homoerotic Slovenian cinema like František Čáp’s 1964 Tovarisi (Comrades), Jost imagines his protagonists as two recognisable ‘queer’ types. Zdenko is what Šepetavc terms the “sad young man” depicted constantly in a fragile mental state, and Nani, a tall, awkward but beautiful blonde, whose hair catches the film’s natural light in a sometimes angelic way. Their unspoken yearning for each other might recall Maurice, or even Call Me By Your Name’s portrait of adolescent self-discovery. But despite being a conventional romance, Dečki feels uniquely of its region and I can’t pin-point a true Western equivalent.
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Based on a scandalous 1938 novel by Slovenian writer France Novšak, the film charts the boys’ relationship from their first meeting, to their first kiss, to their ultimate separation. Whilst neither titular ‘boy’ can fully articulate their desire for the other, Jost does not have them ditch their native language to express their feelings. Instead, he builds a distinct visual language made up of tender gestures, his camera lingering on the boys sharing oranges, gently touching hands, or romantically admiring the other’s body.
A decentralised film industry and a late 1960s sexual revolution provided the conditions where topics like homosexuality could be tackled more openly in Slovenian film. Five years before Dečki, Boštjan Hladnik’s Maškarada (Masquerade) depicted queer sexuality through a scene showing the seduction of an upper-class family’s son at a debauched party. Jost took the fact queer sexuality could be depicted on screen in Slovenia and instead of transgressive sex, produced a romantic teenage love story. Despite having to self-fund Dečki and, as Šepetavc has traced, endure daily police scrutiny on set, Jost presents the boys’ love with a remarkable earnestness. Through alternating close-ups of their faces and counter-shots focused on their eyes or mouths, he renders the inner emotional worlds of Nani and Zdenko visible without words, making Dečki an incredibly endearing watch.
Much like the unspoken desire between its titular characters, Dečki fittingly opens in silence with a shot of a puddle fixed in concrete. It immediately transports me back to grey spring mornings spent holding my grandmother’s hand as we walked to the market together in my partially-native Belgrade. Despite being so rooted in Slovenia, Dečki’s mundane world of everyday images resonates with me even though I’m from a different area in the former-Yugoslavia entirely. In another early scene, where we’re introduced to Nani’s mother, I can feel the smooth suede-like texture of her jacket and I can’t help but crave a sense of belonging in Jost’s alternative queerer Yugoslavia.
Unable to speak their desire into existence, Jost fills Zdenko and Nani’s silence with gestures. Opening his suitcase after first meeting Zdenko, Nani pulls out an orange, the camera lingering on this fruit of desire as if it is something illicit. Rapidly zooming into Zdenko’s eyes, Jost cuts to the orange being slowly carried over and ritualistically exchanged from one boy to another. Their gestures mirror each other as their hands touch for the first time.
It might be pure coincidence, but the fact oranges recur throughout Dečki feels specifically Slovenian. By 1975, experimental cinema was flourishing as a counter-cultural movement and the radical hippy production company OM Produkcija had already established an aesthetic of handheld shakiness and absurdist transgression that Dečki would later soften. One year prior, OM released Pomaranča ali škodljiv vpliv drog na mladino (An Orange or Harmful Influence of Drugs on Youth), a film about getting high and putting an orange in an oven. Although Jost may never have encountered this film, much like Nani and Zdenko’s hidden desire OM operated in secret, and it feels fitting that he would reappropriate the orange as a symbol of absurdist provocation into one expressing tender adolescent love.
