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Independent.co.uk
A Serbian Film: Is this the nastiest film ever
made?
With its mix of pornography and ultra-violence, A Serbian Film is genuinely disturbing, but it offers more
than just shock value, says Geoffrey Macnab

Friday, 19 November 2010

At the American Film Market (AFM) this week in Santa Monica, there have been plenty of movies using
shock tactics to attract the attention of the world's distributors. But gnarled old distributors and blasé film
festival programmers alike seemed genuinely shocked by Srdjan Spasojevic's ultra-extreme thriller called
A Serbian Film.

A Serbian Film is about retired porn star Milos (Srdjan Todorovic), a middle-aged man struggling to provide
for his family who is lured back into the industry for one last film. He has been offered enough money to
set him up for life but, in return, has signed a Faustian pact with the director Vukmir (Sergej Trifunovic).
Milos will have no control over the scenes in which he appears.

The opening sequences shows Milos's young son innocently watching some of his father's greatest "hits"
on the family TV. We see the doe-eyed kid looking innocently as Milos struts his stuff in some ludicrous
Robin Askwith-style blue movies. The parents are shocked to discover that he has stumbled on such
images and quickly turn it off. The scene is disorienting but also comic. It highlights the preposterousness
of the world from which Milos has fled.

Gradually the film begins to darken. Once Milos accepts the role in Vukmir's film, the demands placed on
him grow ever more extreme.

Publicists whispered to journalists that the film was truly "vile". Prior to its AFM screenings, the movie had
already been yanked out of Frightfest in London when Westminster Council ruled it couldn't be shown in its
uncut form and had started frenzied debates about censorship and freedom of speech. The British Board of
Film Classification (BBFC) had asked for a staggering number of cuts in the film and for a full four minutes
of footage to be excised in order for it to qualify for an 18 certificate.

Not since the heyday of the so-called "video nasties" in the early Eighties had a movie exercised the
censors in quite such an extreme way.

Much of the imagery in A Serbian Film is indeed quite repellent. That, though, is not the same as saying
that it is a repellent film. The film-making is stylised and self-conscious. 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. In the film-within-a-film, Vukmir, the
psychiatrist-turned-porn director, may be striving for the ultimate realism but Spasojevic heightens the
absurdity. 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. There is a knowing irony. As in Michael Haneke's
films, the director seems to be challenging the audience to question their own voyeuristic instincts. As in
Peter Greenaway's The Baby of Macôn, he is using extreme imagery for polemical purposes.

The problem is that the storytelling grows ever more intense. What begins as a self-reflexive formal
exercise veers off in another direction altogether.

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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. The film's British sales agent was left hurriedly trying to clear
up the pool of blood.

"He was getting really disturbed and he felt he was going to faint. At the time, we were both sitting on the
floor because the theatre was completely full. He tapped me on the shoulder and said I need to go. He got
up and ended up fainting and collapsing," recalls Thomas Ashley, the boss off Invincible Films, the US
distributor for which the man worked.

What has proved alarming to censors isn't just the imagery. It's the fact that children are involved.
Spasojevic clearly didn't expose these children directly to images of torture, rape and death. However, the
juxtaposition of children with such exploitative imagery is itself deeply unsettling.

There is a feeling of nihilistic self-loathing that runs through the film. In some eyes, after the Balkan wars
of the 1990s, Serbia is still a pariah state. The alleged war criminal General Mladic has never been
arrested. The memory of Slobodan Milosevic hasn't been exorcised. 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 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. The screenplay is full of references to the corruption and squalor of family life in the country.
However, audiences have been responding to it in stubbornly literal fashion and haven't been slow to
express their utter disgust.

Predictably, this disgust is now being harnessed to boost the film's profile in the marketplace. 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.

As with any film that becomes a succès de scandale, A Serbian Film's notoriety risks stopping it from being
judged on its merits. Even its fiercest critics concede that it's a film with a relentless narrative drive. 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.

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.

"Shocking and disturbing as it is, this is really a well-made film," he declares. "Everything that happens in
the movie happens for a purpose, to get you to the next part of the story.... I've seen a lot of horror
movies and a lot of exploitation movies and I've never had a movie affect me the way this film did."

In a market like this year's AFM, full of anaemic vampire movies pastiching Twilight and of "torture porn"
of the Hostel or Saw variety, A Serbian Film can't help but stick out. It has a craftsmanship that these films
lack. Its UK distributor Justin Marciano of Revolver believes it can find an audience among "intelligent fans
of horror".

The movie will soon surface in some form (almost certainly in the cut version) in Britain before Christmas.
When it does so, some are bound to condemn it as being beneath contempt. What A Serbian Film
underlines, though, is that some pictures can still get under audiences' and censors' skins. If this was just
another bad and grotesque horror film, nobody would be paying any attention to it. The fact that it has
already provoked such ferocious debate suggests that it can't be dismissed that easily.

'A Serbian Film' will be released on 10 December

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