A Serbian Film (2010)

"Imagine you were a psycho-analyst and Serbia waltzed into your office demanding a consultation. Uh-oh..."

I was told that A Serbian Film featured unspeakable acts that pushed the envelope farther than I could ever imagine. I was told it would fuck my senses and rape my soul. And by God, it did. And I'm not the squeamish type, nor did I squirm during the film. Nonetheless, it left me with images that will haunt my dreams forever, images that have already started to disturb my perception of reality. You see, there were things I wouldn't have expected from even the most depraved genre filmmaker and this film showed them to me without flinching. I guess I underestimated how twisted the Serbian soul really was...

In a dark warehouse lies a mattress surrounded by cameras. On the mattress, the unconscious body of a cute young boy is wrapped in sheets so that only his ass is showing. Then, in a demented, drug-fueled frenzy, his father crouches behind him and proceeds to savagely rape him. At first, the father has some difficulty inserting his gigantic porn star penis in his son's virginal anus. So he pushes, pushes... and pushes, until the sound of tearing flesh fills the theater, leaving the audience in the awkward position of estimating the damage done to the young man. With that awful sound of tearing flesh, we are reminded of the famous rape scene from Irreversible. That latter scene now appears way softer because no matter how repulsive it was to see the gorgeous Monica Bellucci succumb to a low-life scumbag, we somehow felt that she could handle the trauma, or at least, that she understood what was happening to her. After all, we're talking about a full-grown woman here, a voluptuous woman at that, one with an anal passage of regular width. As for the kid from A Serbian Film... let's just say that we aren't suprised that he remains pale and mute for the entire final act.

"Pain and pleasure... indivisible": this time they mean it.

And even this, this repulsive father-son rape is almost enjoyable compared to what we witness in a previous scene of the film: a monstrous act likely to infiltrate your head like the worst of migraines and certainly something you will never forget. A newborn... raped by a fat ex-soldier who actually delivers it right before submitting it to the worst abuse ever. The new mother lies there on a stainless steel table, grinning at the sight of her baby being used as a flesh mitt. The baby's cries are ghastly. The tighter the asshole, the bigger the pain, I guess... After the film, I called a friend to see if he was coming for the late-night showing of Re-Animator. Annoyed by the fact that he decided to sit it out, I left him with the comforting idea of newborn porn. "The guy actually delivers the baby, and rapes it right afterwards", I told him. He sounded repulsed, then asked: "Was it in a war context?" "No", I replied, "sick porn context". He then gave me a truly heart-felt "yuck", and so I wished him goodnight. What this goes to show is that we can only make senses of the atrocities contained in A Serbian Film in the light of war. For the film is after all a very primitive cry from the depths of a very broken mind, forever stigmatized by war. But it is packaged in such a way as to be immediately intelligible and involving for us, North-Americans who know nothing of war. Thanks to the common ground provided by genre cinema, we can thus walk the traumatized landscapes of the Serbian psyche with relative ease and the prospect of unspeakable horror becomes all the more realistic.

As its title suggests, A Serbian Film is all about the collective Serbian unconscious, and believe me, this is one of the darkest place where you will ever venture. It is a place where even beautiful things such as sex and family are undermined by a dark current of death and hatred, a place that exhibits the scars of war as perpetual reminders of an inner monstrosity that will forever jeopardize normal existence. Almost everything in the film functions on an unconscious level, or at least in some altered state of being that lies beneath the surface of a world that has apparently regained some sense of order. This is made abundantly clear by the varying quality of film stock used to film different degrees of reality, by the use of flashbacks and drug-induced fantasies, all of which suggest that there is something disturbing but very much alive living under the surface.

Protagonist Milos begins the film as a retired porn star who shares his life with a lovely, motherly translator and their beautiful blond son. On the surface, he seems to be living a normal life in a normal household. Of course, his professional past is tacked onto him and the signs of his alcoholism are scattered around his house, but we initially see those only as exposition devices, not as signs of a darker self ready to awaken. The film opens on a scene from a low-budget, 70s style porno entitled "Milos, the Dirty Stud" starring a much younger protagonist. This is normal porn, the kind of porn average guys jerk off to. A little violent maybe, but playful overall and featuring joyful sex that appears pleasing to the woman. Watching the film in a lush, well furnished living room is the wide-eyed son of Milos. Right off the bat, we are thus confronted by two levels of reality: the cheaply-shot, badly-acted, and shady "flashback" of Milos' past life and his present life, shot on pristine 35 mm stock in gorgeously detailed interiors. Under the apparently normal, even luxurious life of the Serbian protagonist, there lies a dark secret that is bound to taint the next generation through mediatic representation. The dark, tormented memories of Serbia are almost like the porno tapes hidden in the father's library: they are bound to be discovered by a curious son. Then, they can be explained in mundane terms so as to spare the child's feelings, but prevent further investigation at the same time. Unfortunately, no matter how hard you try to conceal them, those memories will never really go away. They're an integral part of Serbian life...

Later in the film, after many trials and tribulations with mad artist and current employer Vikmur, Milos wakes up badly bruised and pissing blood. Upon looking at his alarm clock, he realizes that he has black-outed for two days. The only things he is left with are fragmented memories of his bloodied wife wielding a knife at him and other such horrors. Slowly, he begins piecing up the puzzle and finding proof of further atrocities through the material shot by Vikmur on DV. He also revisits the places where those atrocities took place and remembers even more. Thus, through a series of modular mises-en-abîmes (flashbacks, DV tapes, and on-site traces), the protagonist realizes the full extent of his monstrosity. By accepting the offer made by Vikmur (who only promised reality), Milos effectively decided to stare into the abyss. And guess what the abyss did.

This poster cannot fail to remind us of the Cronenbergian maieutics,
a process amply illustrated in his filmography by the symbol of the
broken head.

As far as mises-en-abîmes, there's an argument to be made for the poster of the film, since it contributes so much to the metaphor of the collective unconscious. It shows the bored face of Milos in a uniform grey, but this face is broken to show the other face of Milos, a redenned face distorted by a sadistic grin. This is the hidden face of Serbia, but also a typically Cronenbergian motif. Behind the boring facade of the bourgeoisie, there is a dark, visceral humanity ready to awaken. Be them hatred, rage, lust, sadism, these are not at all inhuman traits but profoundly human ones. Sadly, A Serbian Film is not about the loss of humanity, but the recovery thereof. The recovery of deeply-seeded feelings and thoughts, things that can't and shouldn't be forgotten. Because the problem is precisely the deeply human nature of war, and genocide. Of course, there is always some kind of exterior incentive to provoke those feelings. It can be nationalism, or in this case, drugs. But in the end it doesn't matter because the butchers butcher only out of human emotion. Milos is handed a machete, but he is not told to chop off the head of the actress kneeling in front of him. He does so because he feels like it. Deep inside of him. He did not think either before he anally penetrated his son. No. He just did it because an asshole was in front of him while he was erect. Late in the film, Vikmur basically tells Milos: "If it gives you a hard-on, you should do it". In other words, you should follow your reptilian instincts because they are the only real aspects of the self. Most people can become animals at the first chance they get. But most people are not offered the chance to freely murder out of spite. And this is why A Serbian Film is so important. Because it shows you what people are willing to do for their own pleasure, but under the illusion of a grander purpose. I mean, if you were put in a room with four sixteen years-old runaways and told you got do anything you liked with them, would you listen to your cock? If told you could kill your annoying neighbor and fuck his lovely wife in all impunity, would you do it? If promised a thousand virgins, would you fly a plane into the World Trade Center? Why do guys like to fuck virgins anyways? Is it because they want to go where no man has gone before or because they like tight pussies? Pushed to the extreme, either one of these reasons could justify newborn rape. So it is all a question of context. But what's important, and disturbing, is that social order can only go so far to repress our basic instincts, which will arise at the first opportunity. And this is all particularly relevant to Serbia. And to Yugoslavia in general. Because people there have witnessed firsthand what humans are capable of when given extreme latitude. They have seen families united in death and babies crucified on doors whereas we have only seen as far as the Internet allows. We have channeled our violence into the passive spectatorship of many eclectic things: sports, world news, but most of all, genre films. And by using the many facets of the genre film, A Serbian Film brilliantly confronts us with our own brand of violence. Being pornographic in nature (but not hardcore, thankfully), the film also questions our relation to pornography and the extremes (pedophilic and violent) to where we would eventually want it to go.

But even smarter than all this confrontational symbolism is how the director contains his horrendous story within the comforting familiarity of the thriller genre. Thanks to ample foreshadowing and very predictable plot twists, it is possible to anticipate events at every turn. Which is to say that everybody in the theater could easily envision the ending way before it actually happened. But what's interesting is that they all decided to stay, they all wanted to see Milos rape his wife and son. As far as the experience goes, watching A Serbian Film is akin to seeing Michael Haneke's Funny Games through to the end despite the intimate knowledge of its catastrophic ending, which happens very early in the film. Bluntly put, it is only desire which keeps us glued to our seat. Just like it is desire who made Milos kill and rape. Any other explanation is just wishful thinking. And as an audience, we fully realize this fact. Because as much as we want Vikmur and his minions to suffer a gory demise, we quickly realize that this very desire makes us no better than the killers. In the theater, there were wild applause when Milos assaulted Vikmur and smashed his head against the concrete floor, as is standard during shows at Fantasia. However, the theater soon became silent as more and more villains were brutally slaughtered, one of which through the rape of his eye socket. This kind of violence is so repulsive that it makes us unable to cheer. And at that point, we cannot fail to understand our own involvement in the film. It may be passive at first, but it becomes tangible as soon as Vikmur's head hits the concrete. We thus recognize our blood-thirst for what it really is: the basest human reaction to the atrocities in front of us. The seed that grew and blossomed in each war criminal.

In closing, a few words about penises... and the action genre. Considering the incredible amount of murders by cocks contained in the film (three, if I'm not mistaken: an eye-socket rape/murder, cock-choking, and the implicit rape/murder of the newborn), we could very well make a feminist argument for the film. In here, penises are very clearly equated to weapons. It is not a coincidence then, that the protagonist is an ex-porn star whose large member has the ability to rise or fall at will. This makes him the perfect soldier for the army built by demented artist Vikmur, who wishes to use this penis to hurt and humiliate his victims. Such a metaphor works surprisingly well, not as a simple critique of pornography (which might be the most simplistic reading of the film) but as a tie-in between the humiliation, domination and suffering caused by Serbian weapons (guns and knives who are phallic in nature and usually wielded by male soldiers) and the actual rapes that took place during the war. Sort of a twister of guilty war memories designed to exorcise the inner demons of the nation. In this film, penises kill... literally. As they did metaphorically during the war. But what's more is that those penises are also the phallic weapons of action films. Think about it. You've got this retired champion (of porn) turned alcoholic who wishes he could go back to his days of glory. Suddenly, he is offered a lucrative gig (by a freaky crazy guy) with which he can a) pay the bills, and b) regain his self-respect. So he goes into training, jogging away like the old Rocky Balboa, and practicing his erections, getting ready for battle. This is actually done in a little montage that you'd swear had come out of any North American sports film. That's the hook. The very familiar come-back story. It's Rocky preparing to go against Mason Dixon, and delight us with all his manly prowess. Then, the film basically shifts to the thriller genre, in which penises are also weapons. Murder weapons. And now, you have to wonder: "Whose cock is it which is chocking Milos' old girlfriend?" and "Has Milos really raped his family to death?". When you think about it, the main instruments of violence in the film are cocks. Plain and simple. Personnally, I saw a noticeable decrease in the quality and quantity of my erections in the few weeks following the film. It was as if I had suddenly found myself walking around with an assault rifle in my pants, the baby-raping kind of assault rifles... I even got to thinking that I had lost my masculinity for good. That's the kind of effect you can expect A Serbian Film to have on over-sensible, intellectually-confused, and terminally wimpy feminists such as myself.

See mad artist Vikmur. Now, imagine him fatter, with white hair and no mustache...

All in all, A Serbian Film is not for everyone, espectially not for those who would pretend that our world is fine or that life is beautiful. It is the kind of film that pleases its audience just as the revelation of disturbing childhood memories would please a shrink or a blood-splattered murder scene would please a criminologist. It is a a disgusting trace of bitter memories that just won't , nor should fade from memory. I can hardly tag the film as entertaining, but I can't deny its intelligence and relevance either. For me, there is something that always seemed clear: people don't care about anything except themselves. They will forever ignore the pain of others until they are personnally involved in it. People can only be awakened, it seems, when punched in the face. Then, and only then, do you have their attention. The fact that A Serbian Film was the talk of the festival is a good thing as it should awaken movie-goers to the more atrocious aspects of human sensibility as well as enable them to question the nature of their gutsy enjoyment of violence as a typically human reaction. You may like or dislike the film, you may see the brilliant and complex thriller I saw or you may just see a stinking pile of exploitative garbage, but no matter what your opinion is, you're unlikely to stay indifferent. And that's exactly what Spasojevic wanted. And he did a damn good job of making sure. Well done, brother!

****
The film's brilliant use of mises-en-abîmes makes it a great narrative effort while its extreme imagery makes it a relevant document pertaining to the Serbian soul. A true knock-out punch of a film.