Milos (Srjdan Todorovic) used to be a porn star, but those days are long behind him, and now he lives quietly on the proceeds of his former career with his wife and son. He does however keep a library of his videos, and one day he returns home to find his son watching one of them, which his wife swiftly turns off and explains away, while admonishing her husband for keeping them lying around within the boy's reach. But what if the world of porn is not finished with Milos? One of his old co-stars gets in touch to offer him a high paying job and he wonders if he can turn it down...
There are certain films that are talked of in whispers, not because of their artistic achievement demanding great reverence, but because you don't know if you should admit to seeing them or not. Stuff like Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Cannibal Holocaust, Irreversible - all works that have their adherents, but come across as pretty repellent to most moviegoers who would prefer a nice romcom to settle down with of an evening. A Serbian Film joined those ranks on its release, and in Britain was distributed after over four minutes of cuts from the state censors, a body that had prided itself on more liberal attitudes at the time it was passed.
But how far was extreme and transgressive meant to go until it became ridiculous? If you watched this become the butt of many sarcastic jokes, then you'd imagine writer and director Srdjan Spasojevic had crossed that line, and that in spite of his protests that he was making a serious political point, his native Serbia being the location of a horrendous war within living memory that saw thousands dead. What he seemed to be trying to get across was that although normality had supposedly returned to his nation, the dark shadow of the conflict was not so easily erased, especially as the authorities were, according to this, still the ones to blame and still the ones in power.
Thus the hapless Milos gets embroiled with a cabal of depraved pornographers and before he knows it he is in way over his head, and all for the sake of a big paycheque that he might not even get once the experience is over. In heavy handed fashion it is made clear that the ones bankrolling, and indeed creating, this horrible video are those in positions of power in Serbian society, as if the war gave them a taste for violence that they were not able to get out of their system, probably because according to this the system is so hopelessly corrupt with these characters running it. Whether you agreed with Spasojevic's points or not, and there's nothing here to indicate it was sticking to facts, his approach was less than subtle, though thankfully his special effects were somewhere between grand guignol and pantomime.
With a grinding inevitability, he wished to rub the audience's noses in the grime of what he saw were important issues, but where he saw the effects of the war most apparent in a sexualisation of society, was he actually correct in that assumption? Wouldn't this kind of upheaval be more likely to brutalise the citizens? All right, there was no shortage of that either here, but in his drive to make a relentlessly anti-erotic effort, he did trivialise many serious issues, and skirted too close, no matter his what his noble intentions may or may not have been, to insulting the genuine victims of the Serbian troubles. With the narrative interrupted for the odd spot of barren philosophising from the director of the film within the film, claiming to be making a bold new genre, this could be seen as anti-art as well, but mostly it looked to appeal solely to the prurient and jaded looking for fresh kicks from their movies. They'd find them here, but creatively this was a dead end. Music by Sky Wikluh.
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