So Yeah This One

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It seem best for me to step back from critiquing A Serbian Film on an emotional level, and suss out the nuts and bolts of it and what it's trying to accomplish and what it does accomplish, if I can at all. I'm putting the rest after the jump just in case y'all don't feel like skimming through talk of nastiness this early in the morning.



A Serbian Film tells the story of Milos, a retired porn actor who is lured back in for one last movie with the promise of untold riches that will support him and his wife and young son for the rest of their lives. The shadowy figures promising this movie refuse to tell Milos exactly what he's signing up for, but the money's too good to say no to. Naturally it is his wife who convinces him of this. It really is all about Eve still.

Milos is a smart man, we are told. Milos attended University. He appears to be a good, loving father and husband. He was very good at being a porn star too - all the ladies just begged to work with him because of how he made them feel. So what we've got set up here is our audience surrogate. The camera will of course put us in Milos' head time and again through the course of the film, whether the point of view's supposed to be directly his own or whether the camera is placed just over his shoulder, we are Milos. We have got to like Milos! He is just a regular dude, okay a little bit blessed in the erection department, but since we're projecting ourselves here we're not against imagining ourselves as a dude with a giant dick full of fucking talent so we can go with this.

And then the terrible things happen, and happen, and happen, and the laundry list of horrors and obscenities are checked off one by one, and Milos wanders through - Alice in Wonderland is referenced several times - and Milos tries and tries to fight or get out or anything but there are about seventeen hoops that the director would rather have him jump thorough to make it impossible for our poor Milos. He's stuffed with "cattle aphrodisiac"! The science is there, people. He's helpless. He's just gotta rape that kid.

See, the problem is... yes child rape and murder and necrophilia, these are real world horrors and I think it's something art should address. I think it's demanded of us. The problem with A Serbian Film isn't what it takes on, or even necessarily what it shows, it's that it doesn't earn the right to it. It gives us a game, a sleight of hand, a storytelling shuffle. It's Hostel meets The Hangover. It wants to put us in Milos' shoes so we're implicated, it wants to yell at us, "See! Anybody could rape a child! Even you!" But well first off no, not anyone could rape a child thank you very much.

But the film doesn't have the courage for its dubious convictions. It can't even convince us that its main protagonist could do these things. Child rape and murder and all the horrible things this movie shows happen in the world, but something tells me that it's done without the aid of porn stars recruited through massively elaborate schemes from mysterious benefactors. I don't think endless vials of cattle aphrodisiac are needed. This shit happens, and it is awful, and the director's gone out of his way to make a fairly straightforward horror movie out of it, just a fairly straightforward horror film with raped newborns. Stuffing a speech about how the politicians did this to their people into the mouth of a raving pornographer for a scene does not make this a political tract. Stuffing an erection into the mouth of a woman and suffocating her to death, that seems to be more the point of this movie, I think. It says all it wants.
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