BELGRADE (33 page)

Her children, however, are brought up in this environment and do not see it or experience in the same way as their mother. They learn the new language, where words change to suit the circumstances. (The grocer’s shop is now called a general store because the latter “does not presuppose an owner”.) The communists retain only those elements of the pre-war city that are useful to them. Milica eventually asks herself who has betrayed whom: “Who then is the one who is saved and who the saviour, who is sacrificed and who is the victim?”

She ultimately finds that there are no clear lines of demarcation in Belgrade to divide traitors from patriots, honest people from dishonest, lambs from wolves. Terms such as innocence and guilt become irrelevant in times of crisis, when history is out of control and events follow no clear logic. Belgrade’s position at the turbulent meeting of the Sava and the Danube becomes a metaphor for life in
Dungeon
, suggesting that the city has been formed from sudden and irreversible clashes of history and culture.

Film and literature from the 1990s obsessively examine the consequences of the disappearance of Yugoslavia. The images of Belgrade incorporated into these narratives are based on the perception of a world turned completely upside down in which nothing is as it seems. The city of this period has been summarized in a book about organized crime in the country,
Criminal Activity which Changed Serbia
(Kriminal koji je izmenio Srbiju, 1995): “Belgrade epitomized Chicago in the twenties, the economic crisis of Berlin in the thirties, the cloak-and–dagger plots of Casablanca in the forties and the cataclysmic hedonism of Vietnam in the sixties.” The story of Belgrade in the 1990s is an amalgamation of crime, instant poverty, conspiracy theories and a destructive delight born from the lack of restraint which the war brought in its wake—all concentrated in one city. The problem of artists in all branches was to convey the palpable breakdown of order on a collective level and of moral value on an individual level.

The contemporary films and novels set in Belgrade emphasize the atmosphere of constant crisis. By focusing on a particular aspect or group of people, they isolate the reactions and effects of war, sanctions and a criminalized society. Some films look at the lives of a particular social group, such as the elderly in
Diary of Iniquities
(Dnevnik uvreda, dir. Zdravko Šotra, 1993) or a generation coming to maturity in
Neither in Heaven nor on Earth
(Ni na nebu ni na zemlji, dir. Miloš Radivojević, 1994). Šotra’s film records the experiences of an older couple whose lives seem settled and comfortable. They have friends who visit them in their home to play music, they go to literary evenings, and they are in contact with the city and society around them. Slowly, as the effects of sanctions begin to bite, their lives too become isolated and fragmented. Friends stop visiting and social contact is reduced to a club for the elderly, serving only as a reminder of the distance they have travelled from the lives they formerly led. Food becomes scarce, shopping becomes a humiliating experience and life regresses to a more primitive form, represented in one scene by the wild dancing of a village
kolo
or folk dance in a Belgrade supermarket. Their son has been forced to leave the country to avoid the military draft, which causes a major rift between the wife, who is only concerned for her child’s safety, and her husband who considers him a traitor for running away. Such daily pressures force them apart, and they eventually make separate homes in different rooms of the family apartment. In desperation, the wife begins to make toys and hats for sale on the Belgrade streets where one winter night she dies of the extreme cold.

Radivojević in his film of the following year focuses on a group of young friends who are just starting out in their careers. Their story records the destruction of their opportunities and dreams for the future while all the time the criminal presence around them presses threateningly closer until one of them is killed and others leave the country. One stays behind, and he is finally depicted alone, unkempt, in an empty room, dressed in a blue jumpsuit as if an inmate in a prison or a patient in an asylum.

Stories of crime and conspiracy were common. One of the first films set in these new circumstances was a gangster movie that adapted some of the generic elements of the early films about Chicago, Vladimir Blaževski’s
Revolution Boulevard
(Bulevar revolucije, 1992). A young criminal befriends and protects a young girl, a refugee from Bosnia, and in the end they attempt to leave the country together. The plan is foiled by the girl’s father but she dies in the cross-fire between him and her boyfriend. A partnership re-worked on the model of Bonnie and Clyde ends in a tragedy on the streets of Belgrade.

At the end of this period the director Srđan Dragojević made the film
Wounds
(Rane) in 1998. This is a much more violent story of two young men born at the time of Tito’s death, brought up in a vastly different world from that of their parents. The blossoming of crime as Yugoslavia disintegrates is an exciting time and offers opportunities for them to act without the usual framework of social and legal restraints. They live in a paradise for those who do not care to reflect on the difference between what they want and the necessary means to achieve those aims.

Two novels, both published in 1996, also relate stories of crime, but wrapped up in more conspiratorial plots. Mileta Prodanović in his
Dance Monster to My Tender Music
(Pleši čudovište na moju nežnu muziku) tells the story of a contract killer employed by the communist security services to eliminate state enemies abroad who is called home when conflict breaks out in Bosnia. He meets his old controllers who are now part of a new nationalist
Nomenclatura
and serving new masters in changed circumstances. The communists have gone and his task is now to lead paramilitary units over the border.

Nenad Petrović in his novel
The Man Who Should Have Been Killed
(Čovek koga je trebalo ubiti) imagines a plot to assassinate the man considered most responsible by the British Secret Service for the current crisis in south-eastern Europe, Slobodan Milošević. The CIA learns of the plan and puts into operation a counter-strategy to prevent the killing on the grounds that it is in American global interest to save Milošević in order to maintain chaos in Europe.

Some of the novels and films set in 1990s Belgrade found their way abroad and have been translated or subtitled for foreign audiences, for example: the two novels
Premeditated Murder
(Ubistvo s predumišljajem, 1993) by Slobodan Selenić and
In the Hold
(U potpalublju, 1994) by Vladimir Arsenijević; the two films
Underground
(Podzemlje, dir. Emir Kusturica, 1995) and
Cabaret Balkan
(Bure baruta, dir. Goran Paskaljević, 1998). Each story is peopled with characters whose attempts to give purpose to what they are doing are met with failure and an overbearing sense that everything is an illusion.

Two of these works have a historical dimension, taking a longer view of the contemporary tragedy. The main character in Selenić’s novel, Jelena, is alone in the city. Her parents are divorced; her father is caught in a hopeless second marriage and her mother has left with her new husband for New Zealand. Jelena discovers a bag of mementos, letters and diaries belonging to her late grandmother. The find encourages her to piece together the life of her grandmother, significantly also called Jelena, at the end of the Second World War when she had an affair with a Partisan officer, Krsman Jakšić. Her grandmother is the daughter of a wealthy industrialist accused by the communists of collaboration, the family home on Senjak is requisitioned, and her brother Jovan does not hide his disgust at the barbaric ways of the new rulers. In truth, they are not real brother and sister, only becoming siblings when their widowed parents marry and they are brought up together.

Jovan is sent over the edge in these times of unbearable crisis and, in a fit of rage, he rapes his sister. Finally, he ends up shooting Krsman before turning the gun on himself. For Jelena, this revelation gives rise to a vital question: does she issue from Jovan or Krsman, from a civilized but nervous and drained personality, or from the mountain peasant bent on destroying the city’s heritage? Jelena and Belgrade of the 1990s have elements of both in their veins.

Kusturica’s film also links the Second World War with events of the 1990s. The story opens as Belgrade is about to be bombed in 1941. The narrative follows the exploits of two petty criminals, Marko and Blacky, who use their talents to support the communist resistance and line their own pockets. Fearing that they may be captured by the Germans, Marko hides his family and friends, including Blacky, in a cellar. But, he does not tell them when the war has ended. Instead, they keep producing weapons from their hideaway which Marko, now a successful politician in the postwar regime, exports. The allegoric status of a government keeping its own people in the dark is not lost on the audience, but Kusterica’s exuberant cinema style does not labour the symbolism of his plot. Instead, life below the city develops a logic and rationale for its existence, while Marko above ground continues to peddle lies about the past and his own exaggerated role in the war until the two worlds collide.

Blacky and his son, born in the cellar, escape and find themselves on the streets at night. They stumble across a film set where a motion picture is being made based on Marko’s false version of events in the war. The actors playing German soldiers look real enough to the people from the cellar. The scene is Blacky’s heroic execution which Marko has invented in order to hide his betrayal of his friend. The simple allegory now leaps to a far more complex series of potential references in which the people, the city and the whole country are complicit in keeping alive the lies of the past in order to support the illusion that all is well in the present.

Both Selenić and Kusterica present history as a repository of myths and build up complex narrative plots that intertwine those legendary motifs with images of Belgrade as a city of doubled and re-doubled identities, sometimes even in conflict with itself.

The other two stories focus on the impossibility of making sense of the current crisis. Arsenijević’s novel is narrated by a young man from Belgrade trying to cope with the catastrophe of the situation in which he finds himself. Though not in the city, the war’s effects are all around. His teenage brother-in–law is called up for military service and his body later returned for burial. The narrator, his wife, and their friends survive by taking drugs and trying not to notice what is happening. Belgrade seems like a nightmare, a city crowded with refugees who speak with the same accent as the supposed enemy—a reference to the fact that most refugees were Serbs who came from Bosnia or Croatia. The narrator repeats how everything appears unreal, as if in a film, where even grief is not real but “an ugly parody of grief”. He and his generation suffer from two contradictory feelings of innocence and guilt. Paradoxically, between these two extremes they also feel the lack of all constraints. Death is just around the corner and their lives are already destroyed. No-one goes to work anymore, all routine of life is gone, and anything is permitted. The narrator recounts a nightmarish vision that encapsulates the death of the city:

I felt sorry for all of us. In the glare of a sudden and all-pervasive vision that split the ordinary street scene before my eyes, I caught sight of all of us, running, while the ground beneath our feet was breaking up and opening with a terrible cracking sound, and out of those depths came the unbearable stench of the centuries which, in our inertia, we had omitted to use in a dignified way, a great, slimy pulsating monster was mocking us from in there, unconcerned about the horror which we were conjuring up with our irresolute movements, and our desire not to be. In the course of this carnal bacchanalia, which lasted for one second, the chosen victims had vanished randomly in the depths of that well of flesh. There were many of them. All those who had not managed to find a shelter, all those who had been caught unawares, they were all whisked away, like kites snatched from our hands by the November gales.

The title of the film
Cabaret Balkan
neatly summarizes an inter-textual reference to Berlin in the 1930s, the setting for the earlier film
Cabaret
and the dizzy Sally Bowles character played by Lisa Minnelli. In the earlier film the glamour and spectacle of the cabaret functions as a contrast to the repellent images of Nazism in the background. In Paskaljević’s setting the cabaret act opens and is part of the story itself, not a piece of compensatory colour. The cabaret is introduced by a ghoulish compere, a painted face that extols self-pity while mocking the audience. The war is over and sanctions have been lifted, but Belgrade continues to reel from their effects.

All the events of the film take place one night in Belgrade towards the end of the 1990s. It is a narrative of unconnected episodes that begin with a minor road accident after which tempers flare. There follows a series of almost separate vignettes strung together through the night. Characters who move from one event to another serve as the only link between them. Two friends are showering after boxing together at the gym when their conversation leads them to the discovery that they have both slept with the other’s wife and the child of one of them may not be after all his. These remarks culminate in anger and a brutal murder. The film is heavily laden with an accumulation of fear and desperation, characterized by sudden and random violence. Belgrade is in chaos, its citizens experiencing life as if with no past and no future, just a series of present moments.

The imaginative depiction of 1990s Belgrade is one of reckless fury trying to come to terms with the end of Yugoslavia, civil wars, the pariah status conferred by sanctions, feelings of guilt and powerlessness. Working through allegory and metaphor, novels and films try to give form and meaning to what has little sense or shape. They succeed not only in conveying the atmosphere of those times, but also in representing a society and culture at odds with itself. Internally fragmented and internationally isolated, the city is vulnerable and alone. Novels and films offer an insight into the crisis characteristic of those years, expressing in powerful individual terms the impact and drama of lived history. More than simply a place, Belgrade appears as a metaphor for what can happen when civilization itself comes under attack.