Serbia
3.5*
Director:
Goran Paskaljević
Screenwriters:
Dejan Dukovski
Goran Paskaljević
Filip David
Zoran Andrić
Director of Photography:
Milan Spasić
Running time: 99 minutes
Original title: Bure baruta
I’ve seen a few movies from the Balkans that deal with the violent, volatile period of the 1990s: among others, Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo, Emir Kusturica’s Underground and Danis Tanović’s majestic No Man’s Land.
However, while Tanović’s film focused on a singular atrocity committed in the midst of (media, political and social) madness, Cabaret Balkan strives to present Belgrade as hell and the Danube as a river of brimstone.
The film consists of many seemingly unrelated vignettes, all containing some kind of suffering: People are beaten up, killed or humiliated, and the one common thread that does run through the film is fear, on the part of the viewer and very often on the part of at least one character in every scene. The scenes are not solidly connected, and while some of the gaps were exasperating, one must not expect every film of this sort to be presented as a neatly packaged product of hyperlink cinema (in the same vein as Magnolia, Syriana and Short Cuts). This film is more like Nashville, but without the celebrities and with much greater suffering.
One character calls Belgrade the haemorrhoids of the world’s ass, and the film makes it easy to see why. All the scenes take place during one night in the capital, but unexpectedly (and as a result, depressingly), there is nothing special about this night: It is just another night in Belgrade, and these are the kinds of things that happen; these are the kinds of things that people do to each other. It is a city fraught with tension, always already on the verge of combustion.
The characters are not well introduced, and I struggled to remember even three names of characters in the film, but separately, the scenes themselves work very well – especially when the director takes his time to really delve into the dementia of the city. My favourite scene takes place inside a bus: A young man, frustrated by the system and the fact that people have to wait while the bus driver drinks coffee, takes the passengers hostage with a mixture of threats and playful rebellion. Another impressive scene features a confrontation between a retired, handicapped policeman and the young man, a taxi driver, who had beaten him up to a pulp a few months earlier. The fact that this taxi driver is one of the most likeable characters in the film demonstrates what kind of a city this is.
Not being East European myself, I couldn’t distinguish between the languages and, therefore, the different ethnicities, which would be pivotal to an understanding of the social dynamics in this part of the world. There were brief mentions of Bosnian and Macedonian culture or sense humour, but I never knew which was which, or when such individuals were in scenes with the local Serbs.
The film works because we know it is Belgrade, but even if we didn’t, the film would still pack a punch with its collection of hellish episodes (always brutal but never alienating) set in an unstable environment where the concepts of law and order are no longer part of the city’s make-up. It is sometimes painful to watch, but it will stay with you.