Paskaljevic u Njujork tajmsu

[Filmski_gubitnik]

The New York Times

January 9, 2008
A Serbian Director's Eye Remains Fixed on Uncomfortable Truths
By JOHN ANDERSON

He has been a Yugoslav and a Serb and worked under dictators as philosophically opposed as Tito and Milosevic. He has made films about old people ("These Earthly Days Go Rolling By"), young love ("Beach Guard in Wintertime") and a Serbia racked by frustrations and irrational violence ("Cabaret Balkan"). So it makes perfect sense that the place where Goran Paskaljevic really likes to work right now is Ireland.

"They've had 700 years of the English; we had 500 years of the Turks," he said with a laugh. "They like drinking; we like drinking. We're both small countries with really good actors." And, he added, referring to the 1961 award given the Yugoslav novelist Ivo Andric, "We have one Nobel Prize; they have four."

What Mr. Paskaljevic (PASS-kal-YAY-vic), now an expatriate, doesn't need to stress is that Serbia and Ireland (where he made his 2001 parable about intolerance, "How Harry Became a Tree," and will be remaking his 1980 black comedy, "Special Treatment") experienced some of the 20th century's more vicious examples of internecine warfare, ancient resentments and cultivated hatred.

Mr. Paskaljevic, 60, is the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, where the evolution of his war-torn sensibility is on display through Jan. 31. The program of 13 features and 2 shorts opens on Wednesday.

"He has a significant body of work that is virtually unknown in this country," said Laurence Kardish, senior curator in the museum's film department, who organized the series. "And his humanity, humor and psychological insights should be shared with the New York filmgoing public."

Mr. Paskaljevic is also one of the few Serbian filmmakers to acknowledge Serbian culpability during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, and one whose oeuvre creates a continuum between the Yugoslav experience and that of the Serbian Republic.

One of the first Yugoslav filmmakers educated at the Czech film school FAMU in Prague during the 1968 Prague Spring, Mr. Paskaljevic made films that at first echoed that of a fellow FAMU graduate, Milos Forman, in its sense of whimsical resignation in the face of institutionalized absurdity.

But with the outbreak of war in Bosnia in 1992, Mr. Paskaljevic not only changed location (he moved to Paris), but also altered his worldview. "There was much more humor in the earlier films," he acknowledged during a recent phone conversation from Paris. "I'm older now, the films now are more ironic. But not cynical. I'm not a political filmmaker. But you can't avoid politics."

He certainly couldn't avoid them in '92. Though based in Paris, he returned to Belgrade often during that time. But after Mr. Paskaljevic spoke out against the Milosevic regime in newspaper interviews and at international film festivals, the pro-Milosevic press made it clear that he ought to be shot.

At that point, he said, "I decided to leave permanently."

He later returned, however, to make one of his best-known films, "Cabaret Balkan" (a k a "The Powder Keg"), an elegy for the ethnic peace that had existed in Yugoslavia, and a brutal assessment of the Serbian soul.

"Together with Milcho Manchevski's 'Before the Rain,' Emir Kusturica's 'Underground' and 'No Man's Land' by Danis Tanovic, 'Cabaret Balkan' is one of the essential films dealing with the subject of the dissolution of Yugoslavia," said Miroljub Vuckovic, general manager of the Film Institute Belgrade and program director of the Belgrade International Film Festival. "Of course all these films are not just explaining. They are active in a more profound way, depicting the source of the problem, which lies in the mentality and characters of people living in the former Yugoslavia — their prejudices, beliefs, myths, courage and servility."

To Mr. Kardish, of MoMA, Mr. Paskaljevic "has a subtle understanding of psychological conditions, and how society affects the individual, and how the individual adapts when the circumstances are intolerable."

A prime example of that adaptation is Mr. Paskaljevic's 2004 film, "Midwinter Night's Dream," about a Serbian soldier who deserts after witnessing an atrocity and returns to Belgrade 10 years later to find his apartment occupied by a woman and her autistic daughter. That Mr. Paskaljevic used an autistic girl (Jovana Mitic) to play the character not only reflected the realism of his earlier work (the 1979 "These Earthly Days Go Rolling By" almost entirely used elderly nonactors), but also served as a metaphor for what he sees as Serbia's continuing problems.

"Not all Serbian people are autistic," he said. "But many simply do not want to face their past. What I've seen over the last decade is what I refer to as 'back to the future' — I don't like to use such a cliché, but it's all about looking back to better days."

Mr. Paskaljevic would prefer to look forward, even though his work often displays a dour view of life. Examples in the MoMA show include the drily comic "Someone Else's America," co-starring Tom Conti and the Balkan star Miki Manojlovic, who also stars in Mr. Paskaljevic's popular "Tango Argentino." Also included are his most recent film, "The Optimists" (2006), and the disturbing short "The Legend of Lapot" (1972), which describes a particularly brutal method of disposing of the elderly, adopted from Serbian myth.

To be a Serbian filmmaker in Europe is difficult, Mr. Paskaljevic said, even for someone who has never flinched from his identity and whose work has had its detractors as well as champions.

"He frequently sensationalizes his metaphors and situations, and lacks the oomph and knack for magical realism that charges the films of Serb apologist Emir Kusturica," said Howard Feinstein, a longtime programmer for the Sarajevo Film Festival, who lives in New York. "Yet in the world of Serbian cinema, where denial is endemic, Paskaljevic is the only feature film director to have addressed, however, slightly, the subject of atrocities committed by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims. The others are preoccupied with feeling sorry for themselves and despising NATO for bombing them during the offensive in Kosovo."

At the moment Mr. Paskaljevic is planning his "Special Treatment" remake, which, like the first, involves inmates at a rehabilitation center for alcoholics and their dictatorial therapist. The Irish actor Colm Meaney plays one of the patients. He also starred in "How Harry Became a Tree," whose fate illustrates what Mr. Kardish described as Mr. Paskaljevic's gift for being in the right place at the wrong time.

"'Harry' was in competition in Venice," Mr. Paskaljevic said, where it was well received. "Afterward, we were to play in the Toronto Film Festival, and Colm Meaney and I were in Paris on 9/11, waiting for a plane, when we heard that something had happened in New York."

They never left Paris, the film was shown in Toronto, and "How Harry Became a Tree" has languished until now, on DVD. But with the show and the "Special Treatment" remake, Mr. Paskaljevic is daring to dream of a Serbian-Albanian co-production, called "Honeymoon."

"It will have to wait, to see what's going to happen in Kosovo," he said guardedly, referring to tensions there. "After all, we have to be able to live together."

[Kunac]

PASS-kal-YAY-vic

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