Yugoslavia
4.5*
Director:
Nikola Tanhofer
Screenwriters:
Zvonimir Berković
Tomislav Butorac
Director of Photography:
Slavko Zalar
Running time: 105 minutes
In the glorious tradition of Stagecoach, the 1958 Yugoslavian film H-8… takes a very heterogeneous group of individuals, puts them in a car, lets us slowly come to grips with their stories and their character traits, and before we know it, we know them all and the end credits start to roll. However, with some clever narration, by competing narrators, and a revelation in the very first scene that the characters are rushing together to their doom, this particular film has a core of profound suspense that draws us closer despite us knowing it will all end in a gruesome accident.
The film is based on a real story of a driver who overtook a bus while his car’s high-beam headlamps were turned on and who subsequently blinded the driver of the oncoming truck, causing a horrific accident from which this driver escaped and drove off without anybody ever knowing his or her identity. The only hint was the car’s license plate, which started with H (indicating Hrvatska, or Croatia) and the number 8, which a surviving passenger noticed as the car sped past the bus.
H-8… takes place on the night of April 14, 1957, along the highway between Belgrade and Zagreb, and in a terrifically energetic opening sequence, lasting a full seven minutes, we are shown the highlights of the evening’s events, though little makes sense to us because we don’t yet know the individuals concerned. However, the small snippets are memorable enough for us to realise, all through the film, that we can slowly start to put the pieces together.
The tension isn’t only derived from the fact we know what will happen, in a general way, at the end of the film, but the more we get to know the characters, and the more the narrators teasingly relate the seat numbers fatally affected by the upcoming crash, the more interested we become. Like the best Hitchcock films, the dramatic suspense of knowing the bomb is going to explode usually surpasses the surprise of having a bomb explode while we (and the characters) are focusing on other things.
Nikola Tanhofer, who directed this film around the time his début feature Nije bilo uzalud was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, finds many small moments of tension in this main setting. And most of the time, these moments are not overplayed. There is the odd sudden backward tracking shot from or forward tracking shot onto a face, usually underscored by a violent thud on the soundtrack, to highlight the fact death has understood (and so has the viewer) that the intended victim has taken his or her spot in the hot seat.
One scene, in particular, is as short as it is powerful. The parents, clearly unhappily married, are taking care of their daughter at the back of the bus. She has a nosebleed that doesn’t seem to go away, and when one of the drivers eventually asks the girl to come and sit in the front to take her mind off the blood, the parents engage in a very frank conversation, which they themselves shamefully admit is inappropriate, in which they reveal they’ve thought about life without their daughter. When she is taken to the front seat, one of the designated death seats, according to the narrators, one can’t help but admire the director’s skill at infusing the film with a sense of dread, even as we rejoice that the girl is finally relieved of her parents’ petty quarrels.
There are too many characters to mention, but it is remarkable how the director takes his time to slowly reveal the many different angles to the individuals, and very often we come to realise that we have mistakenly judged a book by its cover, as the real intentions or some hidden secret is brought to light.
The other car, the truck with a father back from prison and his son, does not provide anything near the kind of entertainment we get from the characters on the bus, and that is a real disappointment. At a petrol station, the father and son meet up with one of the father’s former fellow prisoners, a man who is working as a con artist, and he ends up hitching a ride with them and shooting his mouth off the whole time. There is a reason for him being included in this storyline, and perhaps the director underplays his importance, but the scenes themselves are rather uninteresting and monotonous.
However, this is an absolute treasure of a film. Dark and ominous though full of life, H-8… must be seen to recognise what depth there can be in the flimsiest of storylines and how tension and suspense can be established very easily merely by pointing the camera at someone eyeing something or, conversely, by setting the camera in a way that makes us see something the character doesn’t. Or, of course, by having two narrators tell us the death seats have not been filled yet, and have us wait for someone to make a move.