THE POWDER KEG / CABARET BALKAN [US title] (59)

Directed by: Goran Paskaljevic

Starring: Miki Manojlovic, Lazar Ristovski, Dragan Nikolic

The Pitch: One hellish night in late-90s Belgrade.

Theo Sez: The US title is in fact appropriate, this being a series of tangentially-related sketches mixing gallows humour with acts of violence, building not to dramatic closure but only (as befits the original title) to a massive explosion. The violence is undiscriminating - between friends, against (oddly fatalistic) women, infecting young and old alike ("Smash the windshield and pull him out!" offers an elderly bystander when the quarry takes refuge in his car) - the mood despairing, the setting a night-time Belgrade of dingy, nondescript spaces justifying a character's description of it as "the haemorrhoid on the asshole of the world". Amid the constant shots of people yelling, swearing, smashing up stuff and giving each other the finger, a point is in fact discernible - the recurring theme of guilt (most explicitly in the final scene), the innocent suffering and the guilty going unpunished : the film's underlying question is "Who is guilty?", who to blame for this culture of violence, and its (unspoken) answer is of course the Milosevic regime (and by extension the West, whose isolation / demonisation policy plays into his hands : the film was made before the Kosovo fiasco, but of course becomes even more relevant in its wake). It's a blunt instrument of a movie, aiming to shock rather than analyse : the best comparison is to something like MENACE II SOCIETY, a tense action movie without any real political point except for those already familiar with the situation. It is, in many ways, for local consumption, reflecting the despair of a very specific breed of educated, middle-aged Yugoslav-in-exile (made by a 50-something director living in Paris) : Manojlovic biting into a borek after years overseas - the sweet, long-remembered taste of the 'real' Yugoslavia - is perhaps its key (and most poignant) moment.