Srdjan & Serbia

The Wounds, plus Stanley Kubrick

I met Serbian filmmaker Srdjan Dragojevic at the 1996 Montreal World Film Festival, which marked the North American debut of his Pretty Village, Pretty Flame. This rousing The Wild Bunch-influenced Bosnian War battle film revealed Dragojevic as a Tarantino-level talent with a hip, quick-cut modern sensibility that just might appeal to youth. At Montreal he was rushed by a team of seductive young agents from William Morris, who took cell-phone orders from their LA office about signing him up.

I saw Dragojevic later in Europe, and this is what happened: he went to LA, and with a little help from the Morris Agency, gates parted at the studios. He met top executives everywhere who, though they hadn't seen his movie (watch something with Serbian subtitles?), handed him piles of expensive scripts to consider for a Hollywood coming-out. He read the screenplays and was horrified at how terrible they were.

Instead, he went home to Belgrade and wrote and directed The Wounds, which is getting its American theatrical premiere August 6 through 12 at the Coolidge Corner. Cheers for Dragojevic: The Wounds -- harsh, crudely violent, made in the festering belly of the Milosevic monster -- is the most brilliant, courageous, uncompromising picture to date of upside-down daily life in Yugoslavia-turned-Serbia.

When The Wounds opened in Belgrade, in May 1998, publicity was forbidden in the newspapers and on television. But its enemies are not just the government: The Wounds is seen by many citizenry as vehemently anti-Serb, and Dragojevic, celebrated for Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, is regarded as a traitor. I first saw The Wounds at last year's Toronto Film Festival, in a theater filled up with excited Serb émigrés now residing in Canada. Everyone cheered the well-known filmmaker when he introduced The Wounds, but few remained happy upon actually seeing it.

"As I edited the film in Athens, I saw every day the scenes from Kosovo," Dragojevic said, speaking after the screening. "It reminded me of when I was editing my first film and saw every day scenes from Sarajevo. It will never stop. I don't believe we have any future under the regime of Slobodan Milosevic." A scattering of Serbs applauded; many, scowling, sat on their hands.

"You show only problems," a disgruntled Serb asked during the Q&A. "Is there any way you see some hope?"

"No," Dragojevic succinctly answered. And that was months before the full-scale war in Kosovo.

The Wounds follows six years, 1991 through 1996, in the turbulent, beyond-the-law lives of two Belgrade teenage pals, Pinki (Dusan Pekic) and Kraut (Milan Maric), who grow from wild neighborhood punks into Billy-the-Kid-on-cocaine torturers and killers. "We are Serbs," one of them states at the beginning, and that's certainly a plausible way to read the movie, that this demented Huck-and-Tom combo are fucked-up, Milosevic-era Serbia. Pinki is born on the day Tito dies -- which, of course, is Day One of Yugoslavian anarchy. These boys casually hate faggots, Croats, Albanians; these boys casually screw whores, deal drugs, practice extortion, wave guns, murder people. Meanwhile, their gangstermobile displays a huge Serbian Orthodox cross on the dashboard.

A typical anarchic scene, a snotty nose flicked at Serb nationalists: while government TV shows its version of the massacre at Vukovar, turning this genocide of Croats into a glorious occasion of Serbian "liberation," Pinki jerks off in the bathroom, coming at a pearly moment of Milosevic propaganda.

If The Wild Bunch informed Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (American Westerns have always been enormous favorites in Yugoslavia: Ford, Hawks, etc.), Sam Peckinpah's lesser-known Ride the High Country is the film that propels the end of The Wounds. In Peckinpah's 1962 work, two old-time gunslingers who have become estranged reassert their friendship, and affirm their honor and integrity, by walking together into a final lethal battle against the bad guys. "Like the old days," they say. That's the line of Pinki and Kraut, .38s drawn; but "the old days" means the ravage of Belgrade, the rampage in Bosnia.

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Learn why Eyes Wide Shut disappointed with the illuminating new paperback Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick, by the movie's screenwriter, Frederic Raphael. The problem seems to be the source, the 1920s Austrian novella by Arthur Schnitzler, which Kubrick insisted, time and again, that Raphael return to for the proper way to tell the story, even as it was getting transposed to today's New York. From his first reading, Raphael was skeptical. "For me, the major . . . weakness is that it's a good story but not a great one. Its final irony is a little too neat . . . a dark tale that gets tied up with a flourish like a pat little bow. That's not much progression, is it?" Exactly.

Originally, Kubrick thought of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger for his marrieds, not bad! In the novella, Tom Cruise's doctor is Jewish -- essential for his Otherness at the Aryan orgy. The Jewish Kubrick "was firmly opposed to this; he wanted . . . a Harrison Ford goy, and forbid any reference to Jews."

Kubrick never was at an orgy. Raphael: "S.K. . . . is an Odysseus, longing for wider experiences but unable to shake off his own timidities."