Priest's Children (2013)

Directed by: Vinko Bresan
Country: Croatia

Review: This Croatian comedy addresses sex, birth control, and religion in a small Adriatic Island where the deaths are in much more number than the births. The cause of this problem is Petar, a newsagent who sells condoms of every kind and knows every single affair that was happening in the village. Tormented with guilt for killing babies even before they were born, Petar becomes a sort of informer when confesses his sins to priest Fabijan whose ingenious strategy to increase births consisted in piercing the condoms before selling them. By mixing humor and drama, “Priest’s Children” aimed to be a soft, well intentioned, and good-hearted film, touching in sensible aspects such as abortion, infertility, and even pedophilia, but its jokes failed to impress, with most of them being uninspired, unintelligent, or too obvious to be funny. Bresan’s narrow vision confined the film to such a closed subject that withdrew all the possible interest we might feel in its characters. Besides, the pace adopted since the beginning made me feel indifferent for what was coming next. Actor Kresimir Mikic, almost a Croatian copy of Adrien Brody, wasn’t bad in his role, but in truth, this religious look at life's conception turned out to be messy and undistinguished in many aspects.