Vox populi

The Greek people go for Pretty Village

Not since the squabbles in 1978 about the xenophobic Vietnam politics of The Deer Hunter has there been such disputation about the ideology of a war movie. Filmgoers and critics across Europe are arguing about Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, Serbian director Srdjan Dragojevic's dizzying, Platoon-like dispatch from deep in the Bosnian war zone. For some scenes, Dragojevic situated his gung-ho militarist characters in front of actual villages being burned and destroyed.

For the first time in a Belgrade-made film, Dragojevic shows Serbian atrocities; he even has his macho soldiers bragging about firing villages and raping Muslim women. This bad stuff is counterpointed with actual Serbian nationalist propaganda, which blames everything violent on the Croats and Muslims. But Dragojevic's Muslims are bloodthirsty warriors too -- and that may explain why Pretty Village has been denounced by many who read (misread?) the movie as nationalist Serbian hype.

The film was rejected outright by the Venice Film Festival in September -- called "fascist cinema." Recently I became embroiled first-hand in the debate when I served as a member of the International Film Critics (FIPRESCI) jury at the 37th Thessaloniki Film Festival in northern Greece. Pretty Village was entered, and my critics' jury, and also the Official International Jury, had to decide whether to award it prizes.

When my five-person jury deliberated, the critics from Turkey and Romania announced that they could not in conscience give an award to a Serbian nationalist film, though they conceded that Pretty Village was very entertaining and skillfully made. I tried to change their minds, arguing at length that Dragojevic's movie was (a) by far the best in the competition and (b) in fact anti-nationalist and anti-war. To no avail: Pretty Village lost 3-2 (a Greek critic sided with me) to, in my view, a leaden French feature, Still Waters Run Deep.

Our decision was revealed at a nationally televised ceremony, the Greek equivalent of the Academy Awards. There was only a dribble of applause for our French winner; the gathered either hadn't seen it or hadn't liked it. The International Jury announced four prizes, bypassing Pretty Village for obviously inferior movies. Thus both juries had snubbed Pretty Village for political reasons. (One juror had screamed "Fascism!" during a Pretty Village screening and then ostentatiously stormed out.)

Who liked Pretty Village? The Greek people, that's who: on informal ballots, they gave it an astounding 4.72 average on a scale of 5, so that it captured Thessaloniki's Audience Award. Dragojevic came to the stage and, to great applause, announced, "I make films for people, not critics." Much pissed off, he glared out at the crowd, sending daggers and bad vibes to creepy-crawly jury members.

Pretty Village should play in the USA in 1997. Meanwhile, Dragojevic has signed with the William Morris Agency, which sent him to LA for meetings with eager studio heads. Hollywooders couldn't care less about the filmmaker's Bosnian politics; they sense a Tarantino/Oliver Stone-like talent in this 33-year-old, a sensibility that can connect with hip, youthful audiences.

And if a Serbian, why not a studio-based Albanian?

Thessaloniki offered one of the first chances to see a movie by Albania's most important director, Kujtim Cashku. Born in 1959, he managed eight films, though they barely screened, during the Orwellian-and-beyond dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. With Hoxha's death and the arrival of Albania's semi-democracy, Cashku has fashioned a movie that means something personal: the 1995 Colonel Bunker, about Muro Neto, who was charged in the 1970s with Hoxha's most bizarre building program.

"We were told that Americans were invading Albania," Cashku explained to me. "So 300,000 bunkers were built. Each family had one: instead of houses, roads, education, we had bunkers, a unique case of totalitarianism in the world." But Cashku had been lucky enough to study filmmaking in Romania before Hoxha cut off Albania from the world, in 1978. "For years, there was total isolation. The only films in our theaters were Chinese ones. My films were historical, an escape from the regime through allegory."

Cashku learned about other movies by tuning in to Yugoslavian and Italian TV. "I prepared a special antenna on my terrace, but the government would interfere by putting in waves. That's how I first saw Clockwork Orange, with the lines and waves of the Albanian regime!"

A humorous Thessaloniki footnote: British film critic Phillip Kemp told of being denied auto insurance because, the agent said, "you're in one of the most dangerous professions, like being an oil rigger."

"Dangerous?", Kent asked. I'm either in front of a movie screen or in front of my computer."

"Our underwriters feel," said the agent, "that if you write badly about someone, they'll send a person around to damage your car."