"Shocking and disturbing as it is, this is really a well-made film," he declares.
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Invincible's Thomas Ashley, who ended up buying the movie for the US in spite of his colleague's fainting fit, captures well the strange mix of revulsion and admiration that it has been eliciting. The porn star is played with an unlikely crumpled charm by Srdjan Todorovic (a musician and veteran of Emir Kusturica's films.) He is (at least initially) a sympathetic figure: someone desperate to do the best for his family. Even its fiercest critics concede that it's a film with a relentless narrative drive. The film's British sales agent Jinga was quick to tell the press that following its withdrawal from Frightfest, A Serbian Film has been banned in Spain and withdrawn from three Spanish festivals – San Sebastián, Molins de Rei and FanCine Málaga.Īs with any film that becomes a succès de scandale, A Serbian Film's notoriety risks stopping it from being judged on its merits. Predictably, this disgust is now being harnessed to boost the film's profile in the marketplace. However, audiences have been responding to it in stubbornly literal fashion and haven't been slow to express their utter disgust.
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The screenplay is full of references to the corruption and squalor of family life in the country. The very title of A Serbian Film suggests that the director and his screenwriter Aleksander Radivojevic are making an allegory about their troubled and isolated homeland. Films like A Serbian Film and another equally extreme Serbian movie The Life and Death of a Porno Gang play on Western preconceptions about the country and can't help but reinforce them. The memory of Slobodan Milosevic hasn't been exorcised. The alleged war criminal General Mladic has never been arrested.
In some eyes, after the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Serbia is still a pariah state. There is a feeling of nihilistic self-loathing that runs through the film. However, the juxtaposition of children with such exploitative imagery is itself deeply unsettling.
Spasojevic clearly didn't expose these children directly to images of torture, rape and death. It's the fact that children are involved. What has proved alarming to censors isn't just the imagery. The film's British sales agent was left hurriedly trying to clear up the pool of blood. One US distributor fainted as he tried to leave a screening of A Serbian Film earlier this year, hit his head on the door and ended up needing stitches. What begins as a self-reflexive formal exercise veers off in another direction altogether. The problem is that the storytelling grows ever more intense. As in Peter Greenaway's The Baby of Macôn, he is using extreme imagery for polemical purposes. As in Michael Haneke's films, the director seems to be challenging the audience to question their own voyeuristic instincts. Forty years after A Clockwork Orange, audiences are surely too used to these kind of shock tactics to be affected by them – or so we might think.
In the film-within-a-film, Vukmir, the psychiatrist-turned-porn director, may be striving for the ultimate realism but Spasojevic heightens the absurdity. The most notorious scenes (the rape of the new-born baby, the scene in which the star decapitates a woman and continues to have sex with her headless torso) are grotesque but very obviously contrived. The film-making is stylised and self-conscious. That, though, is not the same as saying that it is a repellent film. Much of the imagery in A Serbian Film is indeed quite repellent.
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