Harsh Truths and Consequences

Ah, it’s springtime in Serbia, circa 1998, and the smell of gunpowder hangs in the air. These are volatile times. A minor traffic accident can push a driver over the brink. A bus driver’s too-long coffee break leads to chaos ending in death.

What? Sounds like road rage at rush hour on the 405 Freeway?

Maybe. But Serbian filmmaker Goran Paskaljevic says this sort of thing used to be out of character in Belgrade.

“Ten, 15 years ago it was a beautiful city,” he says of the Serbian and Yugoslavian capital. “It was one of the most peaceful cities in Europe. For us in Belgrade the symbol of violence was New York.”

No longer.

The Belgrade shown in Paskaljevic’s new movie, “Cabaret Balkan,” is a pressure cooker, ever on the edge of exploding. The movie, which opens Friday, is set on a single night in March 1998. (The film was shot from March to May of that year.) On the radio now and then we hear snippets of the news: NATO is calling on Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to stop the violence in Kosovo. The city’s population is swollen with Bosnian refugees, some living in parking garages. Many have turned to crime in order to survive. And, everywhere, there are tiny explosions, people breaking under stress.

“God---- lousy country,” a character grumbles early in the movie, looking directly into the camera. “Anyone with any brains has left.”

This is the type of movie not often made in Hollywood, one in which politics is not a tissue-thin backdrop or an abstract distillation of what marketers perceive to be the prevalent national mood, but a major force in the lives of ordinary people.

“Politics is something that is present in our lives,” Paskaljevic says on a recent visit to Los Angeles. He is a thoughtful man whose films, even when dealing with the harshest of realities, nevertheless are warm and at times whimsical. How could political and social conditions not effect his art, his tone seems to ask.

“The country became very poor” under Milosevic, says the 52-year-old Paskaljevic, searching for the right words in English. “The middle class has disappeared. A lot of intellectuals have left the country, especially the young. Four hundred thousand people left the country in the last 10 years.”

The characters in this story, who are meant to represent a cross section of Belgrade, are frazzled, at the end of their rope. And not because of the recently completed NATO air war (which has not yet occurred in the story). Rather, it is because of profound social tensions built up over the last dozen years--years in which the country fought and lost four wars, in which economic embargoes made everyday life a struggle, and in which Milosevic fostered and exploited a hateful climate of nationalism.

These conditions, while not addressed in the movie in didactically political terms, nevertheless inform every act, every piece of dialogue, every shot. Though the movie is set in the recent past, one glance at today’s headlines from that violence-wracked nation is all that is necessary to show it still has relevance. The film can speak to a viewer who has even the sketchiest knowledge of current events in Yugoslavia, yet those events infuse the movie with the force and urgency of a telegram from hell.

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The movie, which comes with a passel of top awards from Europe, originally was titled “Powder Keg.” The title had to be changed because Kevin Costner snapped up the name for a movie he’s making for Warner Bros. The new title intentionally evokes the Broadway musical and 1972 movie “Cabaret.” Like “Cabaret,” Paskaljevic’s movie opens and closes with a master of ceremonies in painted face. And just as “Cabaret” dealt with prewar Berlin, “Cabaret Balkan” is about the mood in Belgrade on the eve of war. Only here, what has broken down is civility and the social order.

Acknowledging the debate in this country over movie violence, Paskaljevic said of his film, “This violence to me may be more dangerous than the violence in Hollywood movies. In Hollywood you see explosions, heads exploding and brains flying about. In this movie the violence effects you because it is between friends and family. It can happen to you.”

The director, who co-wrote the story with his wife Christine and with Dejan Dukovski, a playwright whose stage work “The Powder Keg” was the basis for the script, tells his story with a series of interlocking vignettes.

A solitary figure, an unassuming taxi driver, passes through the myriad stories, loosely tying them together by his presence. Only later, in one of the more odd and touching of the film’s vignettes, do we learn that his own tale is as compelling as anything he witnesses.

In one vignette, two old friends decide to confess wrongs each has committed against the other. Though each is clearly hurt by the transgressions, so strong is their bond that it seems their friendship can survive. But then one of them cracks. No longer able to take it, he stabs the other to death.

Because of the way Paskaljevic commingles mordant humor with violence, some movie critics have compared him to Quentin Tarantino. Other comparisons, though, may be more apt. His sprawling canvas and interlocking stories call to mind Robert Altman. The urban milieu and sudden outbreaks of violence evoke the movies of Martin Scorsese.

At the same time, because of the Eastern European setting, moral consciousness and dispassionate depiction of lives that are separate but nevertheless linked, the movie in places feels like the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s ambitious “Decalogue” series, only tightly compressed into one film. And, in the way it deals with the violent consequences of intolerance and social tension, it is like some of Spike Lee’s movies.

“People [in Belgrade] live under tension,” he says. “Anywhere you find a society under tension--whether it’s social, racial, political or economic tension--this can create the environment for violence. That is what happened to my country. This is why I badly needed to do my film.”

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Paskaljevic left Serbia five years ago to live in Paris with his French wife, but he continued to visit often until NATO began its bombing campaign and Milosovic declared a state of emergency.

Paskaljevic is an opponent of the Milosevic regime (he participated in the street demonstrations of 1996-97, and he insists that state television reneged on its commitment to help finance his movie because of politics). “I could go there,” he says with a rueful smile, “but I’m not sure they’d let me out.”

His two sons from an earlier marriage and his mother still live in Belgrade. During the bombing, he sat up every night to watch reports on CNN. “Before I could go to sleep, I watched to make sure they didn’t bomb the center of Belgrade where my family lives,” he says.

Though he opposes Milosevic, he also was a vocal opponent of NATO’s intervention. The bombing destroyed whatever opposition was left within the country and hardened the hearts of ordinary Serbs against the West, he says.

“Cabaret Balkan” is Paskaljevic’s 11th feature. His body of work varies greatly in subject matter and approach. “Someone Else’s America,” his last film, released here in 1996, was a sweet and deeply moving story about the immigrant experience in America starring Tom Conte and Paskaljevic regular Miki Manojlovic. The touching “Tango Argentina” (1992) was set in Yugoslavia after the fall of Communism.

“All of my films are different,” the director says. What connects them, he says, is his interest in “ordinary people. I’m trying always to do very simple films and put the actors up front and give them a lot of space.”

He cites as examples some of the most powerful scenes from “Cabaret Balkan,” which were improved on the set through improvisation or last-minute rewriting. “I think what is the most beautiful thing about film is the freedom to create, the freedom like the painter has the right to paint what he wishes. Unfortunately,” he says, “films cost a lot of money, so you don’t have the ability to do that sometimes.”

“Cabaret Balkan” premiered out of competition last year at the Venice Film Festival, where it reportedly received a 10-minute standing ovation and received the International Critics’ Prize for best film. It also won the 1998 European Film Critics Award and the 1999 Santa Barbara International Film Festival award for best foreign film.

So deep are Paskaljevic’s political convictions, though, that he appears as contented discussing them as he is talking about his movie.

“For three or four months, I was in the streets of Belgrade against the regime,” he says, referring to the demonstrations of 1996. That was a heady time. “At that time on the street you felt hope. I felt Milosevic at that time was so close to going. Unfortunately we didn’t have help.” *