 
|
|||||||||
              
|
Movie Review: 'Cabaret Balkan' mirrors an anarchic Yugoslavia
Saturday, October 02, 1999 By Barry Paris, Post-Gazette Movie Critic
The Country Formerly Known as Yugoslavia has produced The Film Formerly Known as "Powderkeg," retitled "Cabaret Balkan" for limited American distribution.
Very limited.
There's no true country of Yugoslavia any more, as we know, because there never really was one in the first place. "Yugo" -- a prefix meaning "South" -- was just stuck in front of "Slavs" as a catch-all for the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians plus non-Slavic Bosnians, Kosovars, et al., who were glued together after World War I and who have hated each other for centuries with a ferocity compared to which the northern Irish or Arab-Israeli hostilities are minor squabbles.
As long as Marshall Tito was breathing, the antagonistic components of that artificial nation were forcibly restrained from slaughtering one another. Once he departed and the blessings of "democratic" nationalism arrived, that ethnic pastiche succumbed to its fierce Serbian majority and deconstructed back into the bloody chaos whence it emerged.
That's a pretty good synopsis of Balkan history, or as good as you'll get in two paragraphs. And "Cabaret Balkan," R-rated for violence and profanity, is a good reflection of the violence that plagues the place. What it isn't is a good film.
It opens with a Joel Grey-type MC in whiteface who says he's gonna (F-word) with us. He and the film proceed to do so with a half dozen interrelated episodes of people caught up in the schizophrenic anarchy that passes for Yugoslav society: An ethnic cabbie who bumps into a Serb's car gets his windshield stomped out and his father's house wrecked in return. A semi-paralyzed policeman chats in a bar with the guy who broke 27 of his bones (one by one) with a hammer. A man kills his best friend in a gym shower. Two runaways in a train compartment resolve their existential angst with a hand grenade.
There are two redeeming scenes: the riveting hijack of a bus, and the quasi-comic pier-side reunion of two ex-lovers for which a floating orchestra has been hired to play background music.
It adds up to an end-of-the-millennium apocalypse of irrational violence as a way of life. Violence is never rational, but some manifestations of it are more insane than others -- Columbine on a small scale, Kosovo on a large one -- and become symbiotic with human relations in a lawless macho society where women on the street are as likely to be raped as greeted.
"Cabaret Balkan" combines elements of "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull" (minus the tender moments) with "Pulp Fiction" and Albee-Pinteresque theater of the absurd. If you're looking for anything resembling entertainment, you'll be sorely disappointed; for something revealing about Yugoslavia's mad despair and nihilism, you'll find it.
Director Goran Paskaljevic and his film are as traumatized as his country and characters. So will be many in the audience, which is not to say it shouldn't be seen.
Forewarned is forearmed.
Critic's call: 1 1/2 stars.
|
||||||||
