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A Serbian Film is a decent horror-thriller, despite its hardcore qualities. Tonight, I decided, for some reason, to throw it on, give it another go, and maybe see if I could extract something worthwhile out of it. So I waited a long time before watching it again. There’s just that little extra eeriness about this that hits me where it hurts. For instance, there are a couple moments in the German horror film Schramm where I really get uncomfortable, and again, this does not happen often. Of course, I’ve seen a few images that rival those in A Serbian Film. But something about this one really got to me. I watch a lot of horror, I’ve seen tons of visually disturbing images, thousands upon thousands of them I would venture to bet. I saw A Serbian Film (original title: Srpski film) when it first came out. Starring Srdjan Todorovic, Sergej Trifunovic, Jelena Gavrilovic, Slobodan Bestic, Katarina Zutic. Well, a day and a bit: “Celts” carries us through to the morning after, showing that those who have survived national wars can also just about survive a kids’ Ninja Turtle party, with even a guarded glimmer of hope left for the future.A Serbian Film. But neither does it strain for allegorical resonance. There’s a natural, conversational untidiness to Tomović’s screenplay, co-written with Tanja Sljivar, that keeps the film buoyant and convincing ditto the giddy, easy chemistry between its expanding, uniformly fine ensemble.Įditor Jelena Maksimović, meanwhile, deserves particular credit for fluidly navigating the chaos of two parallel celebrations, finding room for tender asides and riotous one-scene jokes while holding to the film’s tight all-in-a-day structure. In the way it probes the fractures - both pettily personal and ideological - amid a gaggle of people with a jagged range of responses to recent events, “Celts” captures a suitable microcosm of this transitional, newly minted country. It can be difficult to parse the exact chain of relations and connections in the grownups’ increasingly rowdy, sexually restless gathering, though it doesn’t much matter. They include Marijana’s progressive sister and brother (both gay), Otac’s estranged fascist-turned-anarchist punk brother, an assortment of stray lovers and exes, and Minja’s introverted half-brother Fica (Konstantin Ilin), whose silent, solitary, accident-prone shuffle around the party’s fringes lends the film a running strain of doleful slapstick comedy - but also serves as the connecting tissue between the children’s and adults’ worlds, which grow ever more separate as the night unravels.
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Their relative avoidance of drama stands in pointed contrast to the parade of booze-bearing friends, family and attendant issues that come cascading into the house once the festivities begin. Marijana and Otac’s marriage is at a passionless impasse - the film opens, wittily, on Marijana indulging in some morning masturbation while Otac sheepishly gets ready for work - but they get on with things all the same. Her smart, forthright mother Marijana (Dubravka Kovjanić) rolls with a life of compromise, and encourages her daughters to do the same, though Minja’s sullen, punk-loving teenage sister Tamara (Anja Đorđević) knows just enough of the times to feel more lashingly angry about things. The costume for Minja’s Turtles-themed party is hastily homemade the puppy she yearns for turns out to be a three-legged mongrel borrowed from the neighbor. At her age, she knows little of the political and economic woes her family and countrymen have endured all her life, though she is familiar with their everyday effects: As a birthday treat, her live-in grandmother (Olga Odanović) resolves to buy butter for the cake, only for a ludicrous six-million-dinar price tag to send her scuttling back to margarine. The birthday girl is Minja (the delightful Katarina Dimić), a perky, sociable grade-schooler who looks up to Raphael (the Turtle, of course, not the painter), Jean-Claude Van Damme and her mournful, mustachioed cabbie dad Otac (Stefan Trifunović) in approximately that order. (Love is love in the liberal-minded household that accommodates most of the action here, except when it gives way to fractious familial discord.) It’s certainly the only film you’ll see this year in which Serbian punks and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles superfans party side by side, competing with each other for the most anarchic sensibility, and it’s all the richer for such unexpected overlaps. on the strength of its lively blend of historical particularity, poppy universal reference points and easygoing queer sensibility. A standout from this year’s Panorama program at Berlin, “Celts” has since racked up festival slots and scattered international distribution - including a deal with arthouse outfit Modern Films in the U.K.