Untimeliness and the Balkan Queer Diaspora in Dennis Todorović’s Sasha

Abstract

The protagonist in Dennis Todorović’s Sasha (2010) is caught in the midst of competing claims on his future. While his mother ardently nurtures his piano practice, insisting on a career in musical performance in Germany, his father hopes his entire family will return back to their homeland—Montenegro. During his coming out phase, Saša also confronts a mainstream queer culture that does not quite provide him with means by which to fully negotiate his status as a diasporic queer subject. As this article argues, Todorović’s film articulates these struggles primarily by casting the protagonist’s queerness as untimely. More precisely, because some of the characters in the film offer Saša non-affirmative means by which to realize a life trajectory grounded in his own experience and desires, the film imagines life in the Balkan queer diaspora to be out of rhythm with the temporalities that govern diasporic, mainstream, and queer mainstream life. Here, the film becomes a means by which to theorize Balkan queer diasporic life on the basis of the deferral strategies that diasporic queers deploy to navigate an unideal world.