| CABARET BALKAN Director: Goran Paskaljevic "My countrymen have been living in an unstable situation for the past seven or eight years with war on their doorstep, and under the yoke of an intolerable regime. They've been cut off from the outside world by the embargo, which can be like being confined to a prison. Under conditions like these, each individual becomes, in a way, like a small powder keg ready to explode. The slightest collision between two cars is enough to set off consequences out of all proportion." Goran Paskaljevic Unless you've been in hiding over the past few years it's no secret that the area formerly known as Yugoslavia has been a hot bed of violent ethnic tensions for a while. This film, directed by Goran Paskaljevic (Someone Else's America) attempts to approximate the anxieties of the times and the mood of the people without directly getting political or offending any of the ethnic people's sensibilities. At once nightmarishly absurd and madly humorous the film is a series of in-your-face scenes in one hellish night in Belgrade. The film is full of enough anger and unpleasant situations to upset any viewer expecting a more genteel approach to the subject. In fact you would be hard pressed to find a more disturbing film this year, yet amazingly it's also rather funny at times. The film starts in a bar where a performer in drag looks right into the camera and says quite candidly, "Tonight I'm going to fuck you." Then the short story-like vignettes begin coming one after another usually with one character linking the previous scene with the next. The one character who appears in and seems to connect each scene is a chain-smoking taxi driver (Nebojsa Glogovac) who is always on the periphery seeming to see all yet doing nothing to help. The film's consistent issues are contending with the war by acknowledging past sins and breaking the moral conduct through naked aggressions and madness. In the beginning a young man accidentally wrecks into a man's VW bug so the man follows the kid home and as an act of retribution wrecks his families' apartment. In another scene two life-long friends realize their friendship is based on lies consisting of secret infidelities with one another's wives. So they beat each other to a pulp. Later one of the men intimidates and attacks a young woman on a train. Clearly, by this point, the film is no longer all for laughs. Later a young psychopathic punk (Ivan Bekjarev) takes over a bus and threatens everyone's life, and to top it off a mad former revolutionary artist and his young apprentice take a man and woman hostage; then torture them. Some of this is ripe for absurd humor and no doubt many of the scenes verge on the ridiculous and in lesser hands when the scenes get tough to watch an audience would surely head for the aisles -- actually as it is now many thin skinned audience members may just do that. But the top-notch performances, played by numerous famous actors from the region, keep the film involving and continually interesting. As the movie progresses the action shifts from humorous to more serious to outright horrific. And it's pretty clear that Paskaljevic is giving us a taste of the tumultuous region through fiction. For any of those angered by the film it's easy to say that after all it is only a movie with actors and fictional situations standing in for the real horrors and atrocities that region has experienced. Compared to the real war you could laugh through this whole movie knowing it's fake but, chances are -- if you equate it with the recent war -- you'll be a bit shaken by the end. - Matt Langdon |