Kangaroo Returns Home Without Any of the 2004 Cast

Kangaroo Returns Home is heading to an address the first crew had to avoid. When When I Grow Up I’ll Be a Kangaroo was being shot, the original plan was Novi Beograd, but the production took the only free location it could afford and ended up shooting in Vozdovac instead, according to that film’s director, Rasa Andric. Twenty two years later, the story of Zoran Paunovic was filmed exactly where the first crew could not go, in Novi Beograd and in Bezanija. The new film premieres on September 23 at 8 PM at Sava Centar, with tickets sold through tickets.rs.

The lead role goes to Andrija Kuzmanovic, playing the same goalkeeper whose nickname gave the 2004 film its title: Zoran Paunovic, known as Kangaroo. This time he is a man who built his playing career in England’s Premier League, went through a failed coaching stint in London, and returns to Serbia with his fiancee Elektra, while a British television crew films his comeback for a documentary. His goal is to get Bezanija promoted into the top league. The entire story plays out over a day and a half.

Why is no one from the original film back in the new cast?

Because, according to the lead actor, this is not a sequel but a separate film that only borrows the name. The cast includes no one from the 2004 film, not even Nikola Djuricka, who played the first Kangaroo. Kuzmanovic laid out the difference from the original without softening it.

“Everything, no connection, but I mean absolutely no connection. Which I think is a good thing, because it’s like people get spoon fed a second part in a completely different shape.”

That is a decision that carries risk, since audiences who still catch the first film whenever it airs on television walk into the theater with a fixed picture already in their heads. Kuzmanovic framed the same point as a matter of time rather than a matter of cast.

“This isn’t a sequel. We’re starting at a moment as if time itself had frozen.”

Alongside him, the film features:

• Jelisaveta Orasanin, as a taxi driver
• Natasa Ninkovic and Vesna Cipcic
• Oliver Conic, Aleksandar Djurica and Miljan Davidovic
• Ivana Dudic and Chioma Atuanya

So the link to the original is not in a single face, but in a single signature. Miroslav Momcilovic, who wrote the screenplay for the first film under Andric’s direction, this time signs both the screenplay and the direction. The material that once gave him a sprawling, warm hearted portrait of an entire neighborhood two decades ago has now been narrowed down to one hero and one club, and the genre label has shifted along with it: the new film is billed as a satirical comedy with elements of drama.

What does this narrow frame gain, and what does it lose?

The tight, day and a half timeframe is the most interesting formal choice in the whole setup, because it rules out the usual trick of returning hero stories, running the character through a montage of months in which everything quietly gets fixed. If it all has to happen in a day and a half, the film has to work through scene, dialogue and collision of characters instead of leaning on chronology. On top of that comes a second frame, the British TV crew shooting a documentary, so the whole film watches the domestic setting through an outsider’s lens. Satire grows out of that setup on its own, since someone from outside is looking at what feels normal to us.

What gets lost is the built in goodwill of an existing fan base. Without a single familiar face from the original, the film has nothing to fall back on but its own quality, even as its title carries expectations somebody else created. Kuzmanovic has announced that this should grow into a trilogy, an ambition no one has stated out loud since 2004.

For now, what’s known is what can be checked: the date, the venue, the cast and the shape of the story. Everything else, including whether Bezanija can really carry the weight once carried by Vozdovac, will be settled on September 23.