A Serbian Film follows former porn star Milos – now happily married with a young son – as he is lured out of retirement to take part in a project that, he is promised, will use pornography to create art and maybe even reveal the true nature of Serbia. He will be paid enough money to set his family up for life – and the project sounds fascinating – so how can he refuse?
Milos [Srdjan Todorovic] has a beautiful wife, a cute young son and a nice home, but sometimes, when money runs low, he’s been known to return to the profession that set him up in the Serbian middle class. Now, years after his last film, his wife catches their son watching one of those films. He thinks it’s okay – he saw his first porno at that age – then, later, he finds himself watching the film with a sense of nostalgia
Not long afterward, a former business associate named Layla approaches him with a proposition – a producer named Vukmir [Sergei Trifunovic] wants to hire him for a project that will elevate porn to art and reveal the true nature of man and country. The project will pay well enough that Milos and his family will be set for life.
What follows is an escalating journey into something far darker than Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – without any of its potential for redemption. It starts with a little more-or-less straight sex made disturbing by the presence of an adolescent girl watching, and becomes a relentless descent into drug-induced mayhem, sexual slavery, murder and worse.
The film’s mayhem and sexual depravity make Saw look like kindergarten. Even if you love gory films – and have nothing against gore for the sake of gore – A Serbian Film goes well beyond even those bounds.
Directed and co-written by Srdjan Spasojevic [Aleksandar Radivojevic is the other writer], A Serbian Film wants badly to Say Stuff. It dearly wants to make us think of such things as the various states and degrees of victimhood, the animal nature of the human being – violence and sex are not only intertwined, they cannot be otherwise – and the possibility that an entire nation’s character can be boiled down into a series of increasingly depraved sexual encounters.
Instead, it merely careens from a state of longing through various encounters that combine/intertwine sex and violence in ever more depraved ways. If it wasn’t for Vukmir’s constant reminders that he is making art, A Serbian Film wouldn’t have even a veneer of artistic potential. Unfortunately, by telling us what the film is trying to do, it completely fails to show us in any convincing way that it is actually trying to do that.
In a way, it’s funny that Spasojevic’s failure to follow one of film’s most basic strictures [‘Show – don’t tell’] should rob his efforts of any legitimacy. Give the man credit for trying, but don’t pay to sit through his failure – even solely as torture porn it doesn’t work. Now, excuse me while I go take about a thousand showers.
There is no bonus material on the DVD.
Final Grade: F