Fantasia 2010: Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film

Where to begin? Well, let’s just say right off the bat that first-time director Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film – the centerpiece of Fantasia’s Subversive Serbia Spotlight – will easily go down as one of the most controversial films of all time. It is repulsive, disturbing, and downright offensive and yet it is also very well-acted, has a brilliant electronic score composed by Sky Wikluh, and Spasojevic has a deft hand behind the camera that pushes the most disturbing scenes to the limit (often over the limit). What’s it about, you ask?

Milos (Srdjan Todorovic, one of Serbia’s most famous actors) is a retired porn star whose savings are dwindling and who is presented with the opportunity to make one last film so that he and his young family will be set for life. The catch? He’s to star in the film without the benefit of even seeing a script and is to shoot his scenes as they unfold before him. The film’s director, the mysterious Vukmir (Sergej Trifunovic, also among Serbia’s most well-known actors) intends to make the most artistic porn film ever made. Milos’ scenes grow weirder by the day, and when he attempts to quit the production he is drugged and wakes up covered in blood days later and attempts to piece together what has transpired. As he does so, and as the audience goes along for the ride, he begins a quick descent into madness and rage at what he has done and at what has been done to him. And then, after Milos seems to have avenged himself, we’re thrown for another loop that nails home the whole point of the film.

Spasojevic, along with co-writer Aleksandar Radivojevic, has made a film with the sole intention of shocking their audience while delivering a little bit (okay, a whole lot) of social commentary. The point is for us to be bombarded by scene after explicit scene of the most vile and disturbing acts, to the point where we become as enraged as Milos in the final reels. At the film’s Canadian premiere at Fantasia, the filmmakers explained that the whole thing is meant as a metaphor for what their country has been going through for a long time now, and that the frustration and anger and mental anguish that Milos experiences is akin to what Serbian citizens go through on a daily basis. This may be the sole redeeming value of A Serbian Film, but short of having the filmmakers attend every screening and explain it to them, audiences would have no idea, save for perhaps the title, that this piece of transgressive cinema has a deeper meaning than the atrocities they’re witnessing up on the screen.

Spasojevic is a talented director and A Serbian Film is a technical achievement, to be sure, but ultimately that doesn’t save it from being a film that doesn’t know when to stop. Extremely intense and disturbing films like Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Inside, and Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs managed to be thought-provoking while toe-ing the line between good and bad taste, occasionally crossing it, but A Serbian Film takes a running start and long-jumps over that line in an attempt to parlay its social commentary. Is it important? Perhaps. Is it good? That’s up to the individual viewer. Is it entertaining? Most certainly not. We’ll leave it at that for now, except to say that if extreme sexual violence, snuff scenes, and the term “newborn porn” are your idea of entertaining cinema, then by all means seek this one out. Don’t say you haven’t been warned, though.