How much dirty cash can pass through your hands before your soul is stained? Gosha (Ivan Savov) and Marina (Tanya Shahova), the struggling sixtysomething couple at the center of “Black Money for White Nights,” believe they’ve found the right balance: Professional bribery is the way of the world, as they see it, and they engage in just enough of it to keep their heads modestly above water. But when they karmically find themselves the victims of a financial scam, they haven’t a leg to stand on, either ethically or economically, and the axis of their lives is set askew; turns out you can’t play the corruption game only when it suits you. Bulgarian filmmakers Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov aren’t unsympathetic to their flailing characters in this sharp, escalatingly sad black comedy, but they aren’t sparing either.
Premiering in the Crystal Globe competition at Karlovy Vary, “Black Money for White Nights” is the latest in a run of recent Bulgarian films to unpick compacted layers of social inequality and systemic rot in the country today — it would pair particularly well with Stephan Komandarev’s thriller “Blaga’s Lessons,” a comparably bleak and compelling portrait of a desperate civilian slipping into criminality that won the Crystal Globe three years ago. Grozeva and Valchanov, as it happens, won the same prize for their 2019 film “The Father,” which shares a streak of mordant gallows humor with their latest. It’s hard to laugh much, however, as these two easy marks — hopelessly naïve if not quite innocent — walk into ruin.
