The "cabaret" in the title of Goran Paskaljevic's Serbian black comedy is provided by a Joel Grey-type MC. With menacing relish, he promises us a night to remember. It follows. Place: contemporary Belgrade, a capital that the characters make clear from the start they have no love for while Milosevic rules. Understandably so: hijacked buses, impulsive murders, lynch mobs, drug traffickers, road rage and everywhere the homeless ... just a normal night's work. The grab-bag of frequently overwrought characters, its director insinuates, represents the mix of Balkan temper-lips form are simply parental promptings, more gestural than pathetic.
aments, pretty unlovable for the most part, but accorded the saving grace of jesting self-criticism, soulful regret and romantic fatalism.
Paskaljevic's style recalls Robert Altman's: he can find a rat-run through the potential gridlock of mini-scenes and multi-characters without losing track of any one event for too long. Serbian films are strong meat; some find them a tad gamey. Paskaljevic doesn't disdain this in-your-face self-dramatisation, but generally makes a convincing case for it in portraying a country that's sitting on a powder keg - the film's original title when I saw it two years ago in Venice, where it was shown unofficially after Serbian film-industry politics nudged it out of competition in favour of his compatriot, the tank-flailing Kusturica.
Cabaret Balkan (Bure Baruta)
