A Serbian Film

[bleeding heart]

When I was a teenager and VHS was a newborn--this was before Blockbuster came along, or at least before it came to Fredericton--I used to prowl the video store looking for the subversive exploitation flicks, the "video nasties" as they were termed (and sometimes banned) in Britain. It was a search for movie thrills that felt...illicit, somehow. The kind of movie that I felt scared to even watch...that's what was looking for.

So I watched I Spit on Your Grave, Driller Killer, The Last House on the Left. I could never find Cannibal Holocaust, though I finally watched it a year or two ago. A raft of 70s exploitation films, most of them dull and disappointing; but mostly horror films.

Most are not especially good movies, and some are downright awful. Once in a while, I would subject myself to a truly unpleasant movie experience...oddly, you might say, just what I was hoping for.

Some of this feeling has stuck with me, even though I'm now old and eminent. I think it has nothing much more to it than the desire to be deeply affected by what I'm watching; nihilistic dread has its pleasures, as many a fan of horror films can attest.

I've seen some good ones, too, and not long ago: the French films Martyrs and Inside, brutal and transgressive, but (I'd argue) really fine movies.

And then there's A Serbian Film, which has become infamous in horror-fan circles...and the fans are divided right down the middle, it seems.

The movie is, I guess, more or less symbolically about the oppression, the mass killings and rapes, the war...and this is vaguely alluded to. As such, it goes to great lengths and clear effort to make itself as repellent as possible.

Milos is an ex-pornographic actor, who is contacted by a mysterious figure offering a ridiculous sum of money to make the first truly Artistic Porn film...one which, this shadowy producer-director says, will be about "real sex, real life."

Well, it's called "A Serbian Film" for a reason, so you can imagine how it degenerates. There are virtually no taboos. The violence is so extreme and dirty that it reaches absurd levels....but then, given what I assume to be a vaguely metaphorical context or subtext, this makes sense. The last half of the movie is a hallucinatory nightmare of sadism and murder and grotesque sexual violence.

I've seen movies that disturbed me more, but probably none that tried so hard to do it.

I should add that I heartily do not recommend this movie. I'm not being in any way coy here: I genuinely do not recommend anyone put themselves through it. I think that most people would either find it too distressing, or else simply a waste of time.

I'd say it's a strong effort, but that it goes too far for my taste.