A Serbian Film (2010)

Director: Srdjan Spasojevic

Well, HERE’s a bit of a change in pace from our last couple of items… a film I’m pleased to finally wipe off my ever-increasing backlog (just because I’ve hardly been watching anything for months doesn’t mean I haven’t stopped accruing new things to watch, even if it will take me the rest of my useless life to do so) and will be even happier to wipe off my hard drive and never see again. WHAT A PIECE OF SHIT, and that also goes for the people who made it. By now I suspect this film’s many and varied censorship woes around the world (obviously including this crappy country, where it’s banned not only uncut but in two separate censored versions, one of which was actually passed and nearly released before the OFLC review board stepped in) don’t really need to be recounted here, the film’s Wiki entry will do that just fine… let’s just say it both does and doesn’t earn its reputation for hideousness.

I’m willing to bet that director Spasojevic took at least some inspiration from Gaspar Noé, even if it was only to set about making something even more fucked and extreme than the latter’s work, and, if you believe him, he was also motivated to make some sort of political commentary on the state of modern Serbia. Which is as may be, but any such commentary the film throws up—basically, the rape/snuff film our former porn star “hero” finds himself roped into making is supposed to be a metaphor for how the country fucks its people or something—is hammer-handed enough to make Cannibal Holocaust look subtle and sincere. As for the actual content on screen… yikes. Actually, while most commentary on the film brings up such obvious things as, you know, the “newborn porn” business and the climactic skull-fucking, I was personally more repulsed by the opening business where the child is watching one of his dad’s old starring efforts and, frankly, it has a certain effect on him. Serbian authorities apparently investigated the film over crimes about protecting minors, and I’m not entirely sure I disagree with them for doing so.

But it’s so BORING. And I probably should’ve expected that; in my experience, self-conscious censor bait such as this, especially in the last couple of decades, generally proves to be hugely tedious once you get past the shock value. Indeed, I actually probably found Serbian Film more repugnant in theory than in practice, and was kind of surprised by how comparatively not extreme it is. I’m not saying that just to sound like some jaded aesthete of extremity who can only get it up these days to actual death footage or something; the vile stuff is clearly there but the actual on-screen depiction of it was actually not as explicit as I’d expected. I mean, there’s no actual peen shown in the excerpts from our hero’s porn career that we see, that’s more about the off-screen sounds. Actually, there’s not a lot of overt cock in general, and the aforementioned climactic skull-fucking just looks… kind of ridiculous. And once you strip away that sort of thing, there is fuck all else going on it.

Unlike this reviewer, with whom I am otherwise in broad agreement, I have no problems attacking Spasojevic personally for making this; I suspect the man is an absolutely complete scumbag and moral vacuum, and if he were to meet the fate of the filmmaker character in his film, I for one would not exactly be sorry to see him go. Shitty, vacuous exploitation of the most cynical sort; fuck this film and everyone involved in it.