Looking for a hundred-minute dose of swaggering menace? Try
Cabaret Balkan, a series of loosely connected interpersonal
conflicts set on a nightmarish Belgrade evening, all of which
escalate into violence, some spiced with rape and torture. Based
on the play "Bure Barata" (Powder Keg), by Dejan Dukovski,
Paskaljevic's film indulges the most extreme Western fears of
the Balkans as a roiling hell of age-old hatreds and frustrations
that constantly boil over into brutality. There is for a while
a certain elegance about the way the run-ins between both long-time
antagonists and total strangers stand in for the larger conflicts
that have recently and perennially bedeviled the region. The most
effective of these clashes is a great scene in which two grizzled
souses make escalating confessions about wrongs they have done
each other (each sexing the other's woman, etc.) while sparring,
boxing, and finally fighting to the death, all punctuated with
laughs and hugs. Also compelling is the reunion of a ex-cop with
the anonymous assailant who had smashed dozens of his bones with
a hammer some time earlier, who turns out to be a cab driver who
the cop had pointlessly arrested and casually maimed. What is
satisfying about these two stories is that while one combatant
may turn out to to have the upper hand, there is no question of
simple innocent victims and guilty aggressors, but rather a encompassing
swamp of shared history of general sinning. Unfortunately, most
of the remaining subplots instead feature monsters of ambivalent
motive simply torturing weaker individuals--often men overpowering
women. Without any larger contextualization other than the catchall
characterization of regional strife suggested by the movie's title,
this repetitive and wearying violence simply repels.