Drago to Delta

Brutality in Bosnia, bonding in Memphis

Srdjan Dragojevic, born in 1963, is the only internationally "hot" film director to emerge from the Serbian-Croatian-Muslim war years. A Serb from Belgrade, Dragojevic generated an instant buzz when his Platoon-like Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (at the Coolidge Corner March 13 through 19) premiered in North America at the 1996 Montreal World Film Festival.

I remember trying to converse with him there while he was being fawned over by two thirsty female agents from William Morris. As one gushed about the movie, the other kept cellular-phone contact with their LA office. One of them told me that, pre-agent, she worked as a personal assistant for Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein. Among her duties, she said, was cleaning out Harvey's blender.

Dragojevic signed with William Morris. I saw him a few months later in Greece, when Pretty Village was in competition at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. He informed me that his agent (the ex-Miramax babe above) had flown him to LA, where he took meetings with every studio head. They courted him and sent him away with armfuls of screenplays. He was amazed: every Hollywood script he read was execrable.

Dragojevic returned home to develop a film fit for ex-Yugoslavia. According to my former student Alex Lekic, a Serbian film freak living in Boston, "Dragojevic has finished shooting a film called Wounds. He's editing it in Greece, and it will be ready about May, and everyone says it's his best film yet. It's a chronicle of what happened to the spirit of Belgrade in the last few years, ending with the student demonstrations."

Anyway, it's a mystery to me that Hollywood came running. What did they see in Pretty Village that makes sense for studios? Is it Dragojevic's boisterous, expressive, anarchic talent, which maybe could connect with young American viewers? It's certainly not his story (that confusing war in Bosnia again!), or his immensely complicated way of telling it.

At the center of his war tale is a squad of Serbian soldiers pinned down in a Bosnian tunnel by a squad of Muslims. Among the Serbs are a Communist-Titoist career militarist, an anti-war professor, and a lunatic Serb patriot who delivers berserk speeches about how Serbs were the first real people. While Germans and Americans ate pork with their fists, Serbs used a fork! There's also the movie's protagonist, Milan, who grew up in Bosnia with a Muslim best friend, Halil.

Did studio bosses actually watch Pretty Village? Dragojevic slides among five (!) time schemes.

Time one: 1982, Milan and Halil as boys watch as the tunnel is erected by Titoists as a symbol of peace. Time two: 1991, the first day of the war, when the two Bosnians, now young men, go their separate ways. Time three: the backstories of all the Serbs in the tunnel, what got them into the war. Time four: inside the tunnel. Time five: 1992, the few Serb survivors of an eventual mauling in the "peace tunnel" lie wounded in a M*A*S*H-like Belgrade hospital.

In the scariest scenes, Dragojevic placed his zealous, militarist characters in front of actual villages being burned and savaged. For the first time in a Belgrade-produced film, Serbian atrocities were documented. But Muslims here are warmongers too. All sides are bloodthirsty, but all have their reasons -- which may explain why Pretty Village was embraced at home by both fringe rightists and old-time Communists while being denounced by most nationalists.

Pretty Village is rife with ideological ambiguities. Much like Oliver Stone re-creating Vietnam, Dragojevic conjures a crass, unsentimental, muscular guys' world (peaceniks stay clear!) on the way to his vivid condemnation of the Bosnian War.

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Now that Gus Van Sant has moved from gay fringe indie filmmaker to mainstream teller of hetero love stories, who is there to take his place? I'm impressed with Ira Sachs, whose brooding, disturbing, demented The Delta, at the Brattle this weekend (March 13 and 14), reminds me of Van Sant's subterranean first film, Mala Noche.

No, there's no Southie janitor solving impossible MIT math problems in The Delta. This film starts with an interracial blowjob, as Lincoln (Shayne Gray), a white-burb Memphis kid who's set off cruising, goes down on his Vietnamese pick-up, "John" (Minh Nguyen). They meet again in a porn shop and take off to the Delta on Lincoln's father's boat: Huck and "Nigger Jim" are certainly the unnamed literary source.

"John" professes his instant love for the white kid. But things go badly and Lincoln returns to his waiting blonde girlfriend. End of part one, and any variety of liberal will feel for the poor immigrant maltreated by the privileged white. But this is where The Delta takes a fabulous turn. The film now follows "John," and you slowly realize how you've been duped by stereotyping him as a simple, "natural," Third World soul craving love. He meets a black man at a bar and feeds him the exact romantic lines he'd used on Lincoln.

"John" is a conniver who thrives on freaky headgames. The end of The Delta will put you in shock, leave you numb to the eerie, brilliant closing-credits music of Othar Turner and His Rising Star Fife & Drum Band.