Despite all the marketing hype and media hyperbole surrounding “Saving Private Ryan” last summer, few Americans needed Steven Spielberg to remind them that war can be hell. It was then, in 1944, and it is now.
In Goran Paskaljevic’s incendiary “Cabaret Balkan” (“The Powder Keg”) the Serbian writer-director has documented how hellish peace sometimes can be.
Unlike the brave Allied soldiers depicted in Spielberg’s blockbuster, there are no heroes in Paskaljevic’s brutal story of survival in between-wars Belgrade, only villains and victims. Yet, for all the brutality and despair on display in this inky-black comedy, it’s possible to walk away from it with a fractured sense of hope–Balkan style.
With a nod to Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret,” which was set in pre-World War II Berlin, “Cabaret Balkan” uses a series of interlocking vignettes and a heavily made-up nightclub performer to comment on the madness going on in the streets of the Yugoslav capital, circa 1998. The master of ceremonies greets his pie-eyed audience with an insult and the promise of a harrowing show, then, hours later, he concludes with a toast to inevitable survival of this besieged outpost.
In between, the Belgrade night is filled with a number of routine confrontations and chance encounters that, like a powder keg, all have the potential to trigger a conflagration. One need not be a student of international politics to understand the point Paskaljevic is trying to make.
“The film is about the atmosphere and desperation just before the war in Kosovo,” said the 52-year-old Belgrade native, who was in Los Angeles to promote the film. “The source material was from a play by the Macedonian playwright Dejan Dukovski, which covered the situation in the Balkans over a four-year period. I decided to concentrate everything in one night in Belgrade.
“There have been several films made about the war in Bosnia, like `Welcome to Sarajevo,’ but no films about what’s going on in Serbia. I’m a Serb and I feel this tragic atmosphere, especially after the collapse of our demonstrations against Milosevic.”
Paskaljevic has lived in Paris with his French wife for the last five years, apart from one of his two grown sons and his mother. He often returns to Belgrade, however, and participated in the street demonstrations that briefly threatened to topple the regime of Slobodan Milosevic.
“We won some elections, but we badly needed support from America, because the government has all the money,” he said. “We needed money to make our radio stations stronger, to get the message out. When that didn’t happen, the leaders of the opposition started to fight for their own personal power.”
The Dayton accords, which ended the fighting in Bosnia, likewise served to strengthen the positions of hard-line nationalists in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia. When Milosevic’s regime felt threatened by the democratic opposition in his country, he pulled out the time-tested Kosovo card and gave the squabbling factions there a common cause.
“America created the monster,” Paskaljevic said. By prolonging harsh economic sanctions, siding with the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army and “demonizing the Serbs,” the filmmaker continued, the Clinton administration managed to reunite a divided people. Rather than strengthen the opposition pushing for reconciliation and peace after the war in Bosnia–and forced displacement of Serbs from Croatia–the demands of the NATO alliance drove the people to the brink of war and beyond.
As this interview was taking place, the bombs had finally stopped falling in Yugoslavia and martial law was about to be lifted. Like many other expatriates and refugees from both sides of the conflict, Paskaljevic had run up a massive phone bill trying to keep tabs on the safety of his friends and family.
“I called every night for the last two months,” he said, in a conversation that would move from a Sunset Strip hotel to the dining room of a restaurant owned by fellow Serb and Hollywood legend, Dan Tana. “I tell them, `Yes, the bombing is horrible, but our military forces are pushing the people out of Kosovo. I am ashamed.’
“But, they say, `The Albanians did it to us 10 years ago.’ “
It’s this vicious cycle of recriminations and revenge — a “spiral of Balkan madness” — that the filmmaker addresses in his film and decries in the many interviews he’s conducted with the international media since the war began.
“I am a patriot, and I like my people very much. . . . I’m trying to say that all the Serbs are not the regime, that we are suffering a lot, as well,” said Paskaljevic, who in the 1960s attended the same film school in Prague as Milos Forman and Emir Kusturica. “Now, all the money is in the hands of the politicians and the Mafia, and the people have become very poor. The middle-class has completely disappeared, and the intellectuals have started to leave the country — 400,000 young, educated people have left in the last 10 years.
“The young people who stayed behind have no future. This is a tragedy.”
This troublesome observation is echoed in the opening vignette of “Cabaret Balkan,” when a jaded taxi driver asks his clearly educated passenger why he has returned to Belgrade on such a portentous and frigid night.
“Lousy country . . . anyone with any brains has left,” the cabbie spews, then lights yet another cigarette. “Smoking kills. Here, everything kills. If I drove a cab in New York or Paris, I wouldn’t smoke.”
Over the car’s radio, barely noticed, a news report is read concerning that day’s developments in the Kosovo negotiations. Much later in the film, a young man intimidates a crowd of bus passengers, who are too timid to question both their driver’s longtime absence and the youth’s angry diatribe.
“The Serbs need to wake up and understand that nationalism only brings them the wrong things,” said the director. “They became blind, like the people in the bus. The guy wants to shake them and say, `Wake up.’ He just wants them to act in any democratic way.”
It is important to note that, although Paskaljevic seems to be hitting his fellow countrymen at a time when they’re down and probably in no mood for metaphorical moralizing, “Cabaret Balkan” opened to huge numbers in Yugoslavia. It even was a hit in Bosnia, where its Sarajevo premiere was sponsored by the United Nations, and the audiences were divided both by geography and ethnic background.
“I never was afraid that this film gave a bad depiction of the Serbs . . . if something is wrong, it’s my responsibility to show it,” Paskaljevic said. “The film opened in Belgrade without a single poster or support from television. Word-of-mouth was so great that 200,000 people came to see it . . . can you imagine? Belgrade only has 1.5 million residents.
“Young people accepted the movie because they recognized themselves, and they laughed a lot. I was told, `The reality is even worse than what was on the screen.’ “
Not everyone was pleased, however. The government’s political newspaper, which “wants filmmakers to show things in a way that are better than they are, called me a traitor and said I should be put in jail. If I had any dignity, it said, I would kill myself.
“It wasn’t funny.”
Paskaljevic has been making feature films and documentaries since 1971.
His first film, “Beach Guard in Winter” (1976), was honored by the Chicago Film Festival. But, perhaps his best known works here are “Someone Else’s America,” an offbeat tale of immigrants in New York, starring Tom Conti; “Tango Argentino”; “Special Treatment,” which was nominated for a Golden Globe; and “Twilight Time,” which was produced by Tana and starred Karl Malden, a Serb from Gary.
Although he professes to have little use for Hollywood, Paskaljevic, who has been joined at dinner by his wife and studio executives from Paramount Classics, seemed comfortable in the swarming conviviality of Dana Tana’s restaurant, where his party is seated under a poster of “Twilight Time.” When asked why he changed the name of his film from “The Powder Keg” to “Cabaret Balkan,” he laughed and explained that Kevin Costner already was planning on using the title on one of his future projects and wouldn’t give it up.
Beyond anger over the destruction of Serbia’s infrastructure, Paskaljevic also voiced concern over the future of the Yugoslav film industry, once one of the most vibrant and intellectually unfettered in Europe.
“It’s not easy at all for them,” he said. “Kusturica and I can get money from abroad, but the young generation can’t. I have a son who’s finishing school and he wants to become a director, but who’s going to give money to young filmmakers if they have no work to show them?
“They are very talented, but they only can make their films on video and 8 mm. There are no digital cameras in Serbia, and, even if there were, they don’t have enough money to buy one.”
As for the government, he added, “There was no censorship before, but now I don’t know what’s going to happen. They are much more afraid of the opposition press than films. They know one metaphorical film can’t do anything against them.”
Then, paraphrasing the cynical emcee of “Cabaret Balkan,” Paskaljevic raised his glass and concluded:
“Don’t take it so seriously. We will survive this too.”
