This solemn and minimalist film about coming of age is so sincere that it might easily break your heart. It partly owns its appeal to the popularity of the cycling sport and the familiar imagery of ‘tours,’ to the spectacular landscapes in the background, and even the celebrated novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who once wrote, ‘What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.’ Whispering this sentence, Maja Doroteja Prelog, the film’s protagonist, director, and scriptwriter, tries to elaborate why she thinks her memory of hers and her boyfriend’s fight with a severe form of blood cancer is a pleasurable one. She also lets us believe that Marquez’s dictum guided her in creating, selecting, and organising her memories for this extremely personal film. Despite the unexpected turns, she maintained control, which is most remarkable.
Great things demand great suffering
Maja and Blaž Murn met while students, and by the time they completed their studies, they were already living and making films together. When on vacation and filming Čakajoč, da se zgodi nič (Waiting for Nothing to Happen, 2017), he collapsed. Diagnosed with acute leukaemia, he immediately started chemotherapy. Slowly, along the healing progress, the idea that all great things demand great suffering got hold of their lives. Maja dedicated herself completely to his recovery and found pleasure in the moments they spent together. When cured, to celebrate and to prove that he can live at least one hundred years, Blaž decided for an arduous celebratory Giro d’Italia, cycling from Dolomites to Sicily, with Maja making a documentary film about the venture. On the road, however, the film and the relationship disintegrated in front of the camera and the crew. «I was devastated,» remembers Maja. Yet, she went on and created a rare documentary probe into the process of falling out of love. Instead of documenting the triumph of life over death, she documented the decay of their love.
Yet, she went on and created a rare documentary probe into the process of falling out of love.
Documenting the end of love
The idea that love lasts forever is one of the greatest illusions of all time. We are falling in love believing that, in this particular case, it will be different, but we know very well that love never lasts, and even if we know very well that it will not last, we continue falling in love as if it will. French philosopher Clement Rosset used this as an example of his «cruelty principle» – we know that love never lasts, yet we keep falling in love as if it will last forever, and of course, it never does. So, this is the recurrent theme in ancient and contemporary poetry, popular music, and literary fiction. One of the most popular and successful film genres in Hollywood, as well as in the Indian (Bollywood) and Nigerian (Nollywood) film industries, is the melodrama. A genre based on the quest for ever-lasting love. Yet, it is limited to the fiction film. Sometimes, the theme is addressed within hybrid formats; for example, in Blue Valentine (2012), the experimental film Derek Cianfrance shot with Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling as a couple whose relationship is disintegrating over the years. Cent’anni, on the contrary, is a documentary and the disintegration we watch wasn’t planned.
A new kind of woman
The film premiered at the Trieste Film Festival in 2024, receiving the Audience Award for the best documentary. The protagonists belong to the YouTube generation, so finding the proper material to document their lives from birth has not been difficult. The director has experience making short and experimental films as well as music videos for Slovenia’s most unique and celebrated electronic music collective, Laibach. The producer, Rok Biček, is the director of another innovative documentary, The Family (2017), which has already been reviewed in MTR. They created minimalist aesthetics with only three visible protagonists and focused on the essentials. The voice-over narration is, at the same time, Maja’s first-person narrative. Through her cleverly written text, several social parameters emerge as essential traits of emotional relationships. Two elements stand out. One is the process of growing up. Very different from the 1980s when the coming-of-age films focused on teenagers (think of Sixteen Candles (1984) and other films by John Hughes and brat pack actors), a more detailed insight shows that the idea of adolescence as a passage from childhood to adulthood does not cover the complexities of that passage at all. The protagonists in Cent’anni are formally adults from the start, yet through the film, they both come of age. Even more important is the focus on the position of the woman. Her recognition of the pleasure of the sacrifice and her sovereign ability to refuse it. This is a new theme in the popular culture of the Global North and thus easy to recognise: what in Anatomy of a Fall (2023) is almost a crime, in Cent’anni, is her choice.
