‘Black Money for White Nights’ Review: Bulgarian Comedy Draws Blood

Married Bulgarian filmmaking duo Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov return to the scene of most crimes, unhappy families — or, more specifically in their case, unhappy Bulgarian families still dealing with the trauma and influence of the Communist era — with their admirably cruel latest, the Vantablack comedy Black Money for White Nights.

Centered around a working-class provincial couple in their 60s who extract bribes to fund a dream trip to Russia but are foxed out of it when the Ukrainian war starts, this features several of Grozeva and Valchanov’s regular ensemble, including Ivan Savov and Tanya Shahova as main couple Gosha and Marina, plus returning player Margita Gosheva as Marina’s sister Lucy, among others. Moreover, it presents another storyline about corruption, bad luck and bitter feelings, which feels very much of a piece with their true-story-inspired “newspaper clippings trilogy” (The Lesson, Glory, and their most recent feature Triumph), even if it’s pure fiction.

As such, this doesn’t represent a huge swerve away from the modus operandi that won Grozeva and Valchanov the top prize for The Father in 2019 at Karlovy Vary, where Black Money debuted this year. Still, the team’s collective command of comic timing and an eye for telling detail hasn’t waned a bit, while the package is eased along by Yorgos Mavropsaridis’ stylish editing, traits shared with the many films Mavropsaridis cut for Yorgos Lanthimos (including Kinds of Kindness and Poor Things). In fact, while Grozeva and Valchanov are profoundly grounded in their north Balkan homeland, there’s a lot of sensibility overlap here with the absurdism of the Greek Weird Wave of 2010s.

Residents of a smallish town outside of the capital Sofia, Gosha and Marina are a childless couple who have held down low-key lucrative positions for some time. Gosha is the stationmaster for the town’s railway station, which means he gets bribes from locals who come to siphon off diesel fuel from shipping containers. Marina, meanwhile, is a nurse in the maternity wing of the local hospital, which means she collects illegal cash “gifts” from patients hoping for better-than-usual treatment while they give birth.

Between them, they’ve squirreled away over 10,000 Bulgarian leva (about $5K in USD) by 2022 — enough to pay for their dream trip to St. Petersburg and beyond in June that year in order to admire the white nights at a latitude where the sun almost never sets, followed by a trip on the Trans-Siberian railway. Marina is a fierce Russophile and believes the father she never knew was Russian, based on flimsy evidence. Gosha just wants to keep his volatile, fantasy-prone wife happy.

After their final payment to an agency in Sofia, fronted by a foreboding redhead equipped with a mechanical smile and a calculator, Russia invades Ukraine. Somehow, this fails to trouble the couple, who expect that they will get around the EU ban on travel to Russia by taking a flight from Serbia. But when June rolls round and the couple show up in the Sofia central square where they expect to catch their bus to Belgrade, the coach is nowhere to be seen, even accounting for the chaos caused by the rainbow-flag-flying Pride marchers and black-clad anti-Pride marchers milling about everywhere that day. (Presumably, the filmmakers took advantage of real events going on in Sofia at the time.)

Despite resistance from Marina, the couple are compelled to accept hospitality from Marina’s sister Lucy (Gosheva) and her taxi-driver husband (Ivan Barnev) while they investigate what’s happened to their dream trip. When Gosha goes to the office where they used to meet the redheaded receptionist, the place is completely empty apart from a tetchy estate agent expecting to lease the premises to a new client. A visit to the police reveals that the travel agency went bust after the Ukrainian invasion.

But Gosha and Marina can’t cope with the cruel accidental irony that the money they grifted has been grifted away from them, and end up taking desperate measures. In Gosha’s case, that involves getting mixed up with gangsters at a seedy nightclub, a sequence that quickly deteriorates from being mildly comical to sinister to outright terrifying by even degrees.

Indeed, Grozeva and Valchanov’s sly ability to shift tones from ripely comical to appalling is one of their defining features as filmmakers, along with a penchant for weird and wacky side characters. That includes a scabby stranger who may or may not be a priest whom Marina meets in a graveyard, for example, and Barnev’s hard-rocking cab driver, who, with his wife Lucy, has raised an adorable trio of classically trained tots. (The kids’ slightly halting but spirited rendition of a Tchaikovsky piece is a highlight here, one of the film’s few moments of uncomplicated sweetness.)

The performances in general feel semi-improvised judging by the overlapping dialogue and sense of spontaneity, an impression bolstered by the freewheeling, woozy bright camerawork, overseen by DP Alexander Stanishev (one of the few newcomers to Grozeva and Valchanov’s crew of regulars). That breezy naturalism helps ease down what some viewers might consider a bitter, depressing pill given the movie’s increasingly bleak trajectory, saved at the very last minute by dialogue heard over the credits that reassures us that the worst outcome has been narrowly averted.