When writer/director Luka Marčetić started work on Girl in the Night, he wanted to make a film set within a boring world where even the unexpected and phenomenal is low-key. That didn’t prevent him from the excitement of the Slovenian dry comedy winning the Best Picture award in the main competition at this year’s Fantastic Fest.
According to Marčetić, Girl in the Night is best described as “a superhero movie with awkward people,” an idea that came from “me being myself, being an awkward, quiet person.”
From the outside, Rok (Urban Kuntarič) and Iza (Lara Wolf) are very ordinary, slightly tragic, and seemingly dull characters. He works the late shift in a gas station and gets his thrills from stealing candy bars. She’s a sullen customer who comes in for late-night supplies. But under that hooded jacket she’s the embodiment of violent revenge, a hero cleaning the streets of criminals who also claims she has superpowers. The question is whether Rok will become her sidekick or her nemesis.
The entirety of Girl in the Night is a subtle inversion of almost every superhero trope, including its location: Ljubljana, capital of and the largest city in Slovenia, which Marčetić depicts as “a boring city where nothing ever happens. So, it was a challenge in how to do it in a way that would be fun to watch.”
To create that dichotomy of an interesting film set in a dull place, he took inspiration from Napoleon Dynamite, the works of Fantastic Fest veteran Yorgos Lanthimos, and the films of Riley Stearns, most especially The Art of Self Defense. Marčetić said, “I really like quietness, I really like awkward silences, so a part of the world building is the dialogue. I really find it funny if people talk in a childlike way but they are very extremely serious about it. The whole film is serious and there’s cinematic music, but there are some really absurdist jokes in it.”
However, he never viewed the jokes as a crutch for the plot. “I regard a good comedy as a comedy where if you remove the comedy from the film and it’s still working, then I guess it’s a good film, and then if you add jokes to it then it becomes a good comedy.”
Of course, his awkward, quiet superheroes aren’t going to be saving the world, and so Marčetić’s story centers on something much more low stakes, but also very much connected to Ljubljana: bicycles. “We have a bicycle culture,” Wolf said.
“And our city is notorious for stealing bikes,” Marčetić added. That created the perfect instigating incident for his idea to create a low-key superhero story, “one that’s realistic and small enough, but unimportant for the person.”
“It’s something that will resonate with every man in Ljubljana,” Kuntarič said. “If you get your bike stolen, you know, oh, I have to be somewhere in 10 minutes and I’m not getting there.”
At the heart of the drama and the comedy is the relationship between Iza and Rok, a deliberately lopsided affair due to their extreme height difference. He towers over her by almost two feet, but it’s clear that all the power lies with her. “This was not planned,” Marčetić said. He auditioned his leads separately, “and I actually got to use this height difference to the advantage of the film.”
“I absolutely adored it,” Kuntarič said, “because usually what happens on set is they go, ‘Urban, can you scooch down a bit? Can you go a little bit lower on the knees so we can get you?’ and on this set, the DP went, ‘Nope, we want you exactly as tall as you are.’”
Marčetić soon discovered that the way to make these scenes work wasn’t in hiding the height difference, but in making sure that the tilt of their heads was just right, with an inch difference making or breaking a shot. He said, “When she looks up, it can easily look like she’s doing puppy eyes, and that wasn’t scary.”
“It’s a thin line between being puppy eyes and being a menace,” Wolf laughed.
All of Iza’s intensity and raw fury is summed up in her unrelenting gaze. “Everything was in the eyes,“ Wolf said. “It was hard not to blink, especially at night when you’re tired, and you’d hear Luka go, ‘No blinking with your eyes!’”
“That’s what I liked about you,” Marčetić said. “When we met on the audition you had these really blank eyes where you couldn’t see behind them and it was creepy, and I fell in love with your character.”
By contrast, Kuntarič said that finding Rok’s signature facial expression was “a long process.” Luckily, the production of Girl in the Night was longer than most indie films. Before the 27-day primary shoot, Marčetić and the team had a year of rehearsals, then spent 12 days doing a full pre-visualization on location. “It would have been an almost easy shoot,” Marčetić said, “if it hadn’t been for 20 consecutive days of night shoots in winter in a crowded neighborhood where everyone was asleep.”
However, that extended preproduction gave Kuntarič time to find Rok’s look. He said, “I had this method of driving home at night, cranking my favorite music on and just having a blank expression, to not feel anything. At one rehearsal, there was this expression of complete boredom that I did, and Luka was like, ‘This is the guy. That’s what we’re looking for. Remember that one.’”
Girl in the Night
World Premiere
Wednesday, Sept. 23, 8pm
Fantastic Fest runs Sept. 17-24 at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. Badges and info at fantasticfest.com. Follow our coverage at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.
