Themes
The film's title Libertas (Latin for "liberty") is an ironic reference to the motto of the Republic of Ragusa: Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro ("Liberty is not well sold for all the gold"). Although the reviewers were nearly unanimous in recognizing the film's subtext as a condemnation of modern despotism, Variety's reviewer Robert Koehler felt it was referring to Eastern Europe's communist regimes, while Croatian critics saw it rather as an allegory of post-communist Croatia. According to Croatian columnist and film critic Jurica Pavičić, a "small republic obsessed with independence, but totalitarian on the inside" is easily recognized as the 1990s Croatia, a suggestion which was explicitly confirmed as intentional by Bulajić.
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Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)