Record about Milena Dravić: A man in whom all good people can fit

"I have boundless faith in that, in the bond and feeling between a person and the part of the world that has been assigned to him." (Milena Dravič)

To us, she was an actress. In the sense that one name replaces an entire concept. Sublime, yet close, ours.

We loved her for the roles and, not only for identifying with them, we believed that she was a good person. That the best human qualities lie in that inner immensity. "Who wouldn't like her like that?!", says Petar Božović.

And what a range of roles it is: from the "black wave", through partisan films, to popular comedies, television dramas and series and entertainment TV formats. Like a Yugoslav film.

Milena brought something dignified to each role. Something she carried inside her, different from the ordinary and the usual. With a face of childish exuberance and sage melancholy. And with a balletic, graceful step.

Until the end, as she said, she was and remained a nerd. She would prepare long and patiently, shaping the role like a pearl is formed in a shell. Absolute dedication as absolute hearing, as an ethical principle. "Being ready, that's all."

If it was written for an actress, Milena would be the best Hamlet.

And if there were years of suspicion and silence? Was.

Biographers will correct mistakes.

Even before I had the honor of working together, I heard about her thanks to a family privilege, an acquaintance perhaps started on the film "Horoscope" by Boro Drašković, after which Milena and Dragan would become the most famous Yugoslav couple. Love, as a drama of completion.

"To this day, when I watch her first film, Prekobrojna, and when that scene comes where Milena sings This morning my rose bloomed... tears come to my eyes. And let's not talk about the end of the movie Morning, about the scene of her shooting, which is the most poetic and beautiful thing I've seen not only in a Yugoslav film. The way she played that scene in its entirety is the culmination and catharsis in our business, that sequence is worth living for, you can't go any further than that."

In 2007, we shot a short feature film in Perast and Dobrota, in which Milena played the main role. That film could neither add nor take away much from her career, but she worked as if she was at the beginning and as if everything depended on that role. She made us think that we were doing something important.

It's like that on the recording, moving pictures cancel the distance between reality and dream, between body and soul. Observing her face in the frame, it would happen that we forget about the controls, about taking care of the tape that wears out at a warning speed.

To explain what he is looking for from an actor in a film, that is, a model (as he calls his naturists), Bresson cites a story he found in Montaigne's essays about a tramp in the ruts of winter and a man wrapped up to his ears. "And you, sir, have been exposed. Now imagine that I am the whole face."

The face, the first mask.

Milena was exhausted from the long night filming, but it wouldn't be felt in the frame in the slightest. Always ready to be different, to offer another possibility of interpretation.

With what attention she treated each member of the team. Exceptional manners, but not a person of form. When she asked how you were, you knew she meant it. And then it's not easy for you to answer.

During the breaks, when the weather would throw us into despair, we would talk about film, about art in general. This continued later when we would meet, because Milena followed everything. At festivals, you could only see her for a short time, between two film screenings.

Looking at her these days in different roles, in different lives, it seems to me that she carried in herself some unusual combination of melancholic Hyperborean spirit and the heated temperament of the Mediterranean, which was her second home.

She was a unique personality: in her lordship, gift and humanity. A man in whom all good men can fit.

Passed through the cinema projector, the light preserves the imprint of that face.

Time has stopped.

The film flows.