PRETTY VILLAGE, PRETTY FLAME (68)

Directed by: Srdjan Dragojevic

Starring: Dragan Bjelogrlic, Velimir-Bata Zivojinovic, Lisa Mancure

The Pitch: During the war in Bosnia a platoon of Serb soldiers are trapped in a tunnel, surrounded and besieged by their Muslim enemies (and childhood friends).

Theo Sez: The defining moment in this extraordinary movie probably comes when an American journalist, accidentally trapped in the tunnel with the Serb platoon, turns her camera on one of the soldiers, telling him to "just introduce yourself" - to which the Serb smiles, thinks for a moment and replies : "Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and fame." Sympathy For The Devil indeed : the film - denounced as "fascism" at the Venice Film Festival, and still [in Apr '97] unreleased commercially outside of Yugoslavia and pro-Serb countries like Greece and Cyprus - is in the same category as BIRTH OF A NATION and TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, hugely sophisticated both technically and dramatically but hugely problematic politically. It's what an Oliver Stone film might be like if Stone was actually the extremist he likes to paint himself as (instead of the screwed-up but basically cuddly liberal he really is) : a rock 'n roll movie in APOCALYPSE NOW! vein, War as a loud, surreal, frequently hilarious, utterly insane circus - yet also a film in which anti-war protesters are seedy-looking and thoroughly unsympathetic (one of them even trips up a crippled veteran on crutches!), in which we learn that Serbia is "the oldest nation in Europe", and in which the platoon soldiers, despite their different backgrounds and personalities, fight well together and are, in the end, as close to heroic as makes no difference. It's an odd experience - somehow we don't expect artists to be militaristic. We expect propaganda to take over a movie, crudely drowning out its finer qualities - yet this, steeped though it is in the paranoid nationalism that's caused so much suffering, is still a first-rate film, a dense narrative (jumping back and forth in time) with an anarchic sense of humour and hardly a dull moment. In a way - despite the frenzied style - it's reminiscent of WW2 movies like A WALK IN THE SUN, honest and well-characterised but inescapably propaganda at least in never questioning the war. The difference, of course, is that WW2 is thought of as a "good" war whereas the Serbs - demonised by the Western media, not entirely unfairly - are seen as fighting for an evil cause ; but then History has alaways been written by the winners.