Lerman's 14 For '14 Day Four: A SERBIAN FILM Will Make You Unclean

"Start with the little one."

GAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH.

Immediately after watching A Serbian Film I found myself relieved that I hadn't yet showered that day, as I would have certainly felt compelled to cleanse myself for a second time.  Then again, I'm the one who asked Lerman to find me some "out there" shit.  This is what I signed up for.

A Serbian Film was something I'd heard rumors about for years, spoken in hushed tones by those who had seen it and likely wished they hadn't.  I read plenty of stuff about controversial films and sometimes it feels like the hype is far more dramatic than the actual material, but the way people talked about A Serbian film...this was different.  I still haven't gotten around to watching either of the Human Centipede movies yet, but now the idea of people whose mouths are sewn to assholes seems positively quaint by comparison.  To be clear, I'm not generally one who reacts to art with outrage and pearl-clutching.  I've never been offended by a joke and, when it comes to narrative film, there's not much you can depict that will make me seriously flinch.  But this thing has been haunting me for days now.  This is a film that is so fucked up, I couldn't even pull up the IMDb page at work because it was blocked by the office firewall.

When Jamie isn't really interested in a movie I'm watching, she tends to sit on the couch with her laptop and headphones, listening to One Direction.  This time, I made sure she left the room entirely.

The story starts off almost playfully puerile, with Milosh, the one-time Marlon Brando of pornography, now retired and struggling to provide for his beautiful wife and son.  One of his former co-stars gets in touch with a job offer; a new and charismatic filmmaker named Vukmir Vukmir wants to make truly artistic pornography and he's willing to pay ludicrous amounts of money to his star.  He needs the best.  He needs Milosh.  We're then treated to a Rocky-esque training montage as Milosh tries to get back in shape and focus his skills for his big return to the cameras.  In an inspired moment, we even experience Milosh get (and then lose) an erection all from the perspective of his dick.  Penis POV!  It's exactly the right balance of truly weird and slyly brilliant.  I was really starting to enjoy this thing. What was all the fuss about?

Oh Daley, you sweet, naive fool.

Vukmir's production turns out to be pretty fucked up, shooting in a former orphanage with at least one underage girl present and featuring a lot of women suffering physically abuse.  Part of Milosh's contract stipulates that he won't know what the scenes entail before filming, but faced with some pretty degrading material Milosh decides to cut bait and go back to retirement.  However when he tries to break the bad news to Vukmir, Milosh is drugged and awakens three days later, forced to retrace his steps and piece together exactly what went down and why he doesn't remember it.

Just before Milosh is drugged, Vukmir shows him a clip of a new kind of pornography, something so horrifying and patently immoral that I was convinced that the film had reached peak awfulness.  The next thirty minutes proved me so very, very wrong.  A Serbian Film was just getting warmed up.  I won't detail any of the depraved, abhorrent action that followed for one simple reason: 90% of you don't want to know that someone even contemplated such behavior, let alone depicted it on film, and for the 10% of you (that might be a generous estimate) who, like me, suffer from insatiable curiosity, telling you anything would be counterproductive. You simply have to see it.

I suppose one could make an argument that those behind A Serbian Film are trying to take a stance against the porn industry and all the lives that it destroys.  It certainly subverts any kind of playful, Don Jon-esque representation of porn and focuses instead on the dark and disturbing underbelly of the business, taking that representation to the absolute extreme edge of decency.  It's not too dissimilar to Scorcese's strategy with Wolf Of Wall Street, fully embracing any and all excess and taking the story completely over the top to the point of near absurdity in order to provoke a specific response in the audience and forever change their perception of the parties involved, be they Wall Street brokers or pornographers.

Or these guys could just be a bunch of sick fucks.

Who can say?

A Serbian Film is such an insane, singular experience that I almost can't believe that it exists on any level.  That it was written, shot, edited and then made available to the public seems beyond my comprehension.  I'm glad I watched it once, but I'm honestly not sure I can ever sit through it again.  And that's saying something.

What's The Connection? - Necrophilia!  Plus, both High Tension and A Serbian Film feature some seriously disturbing blowjobs.

Up Next - The Vanishing (1988)

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Title: A Serbian Film
Director: Srdjan Spasojevic
Starring: Srdjan Todorovic, Sergej Trifunovic, Jelena Gavrilovic, Slobodan Bestic, Katarina Zutic
Year Of Release: 2010
Viewing Method: Digital Copy (TV)

Lerman's 14 For '14 Day Three: HIGH TENSION Is A Beautiful, Bloody High Wire Act

"I'm glad I finally met your family."

I can't believe it's really been ten years since High Tension came out.  I've been meaning to watch this movie forever, but I hadn't realized that so much time had passed.  It's a feeling that comes more and more frequently these days, especially when it comes to stuff like attending my little brother's college graduation in the spring.  It's little wonder that I missed this film in its theatrical run, as horror films historically tend to fall pretty low on my list of priorities, but my recent month-long horror extravaganza has certainly given me a better appreciation for the genre.  This was the film that put director Alexandre Aja on the map in America, and oddly enough I've actually seen his two best known follow-ups, remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and Piranha 3D.  (He also has a film coming out this year in which Daniel Radcliffe sprouts devil horns.)

The film's title perfectly captures what makes it so engrossing.  The story follows two attractive college girls, Marie and Alex, who head off to the latter's remote family home in order to study for exams.  But shortly after arriving, a hulking hillbilly in a rusted out delivery truck arrives and forces his way into the house, silently slaughtering the entire family and kidnapping Alex.  Marie is able to hide and then stow away in the van in order to rescue Alex, who Marie is secretly in love with.  And so the majority of the film is an exercise in maintaining tension, placing the audience directly in Marie's shoes and drawing out her discovery by their attacker for as long as humanly possible until the two are forced to eventually confront each other in the woods.  Taken purely as an exercise in dramatic momentum, the film is wildly successful.  I was at the edge of my seat and talking to the screen the whole time.

Sadly, it's easy to see why most people probably walk away from High Tension dwelling not on the film's masterful second act, but instead on the crazy third act twist.  Typically I'd tip-toe around the spoilers, but considering the film is now over a decade old, we might as well dig in.  When the police finally enter the picture, they watch security footage from a gas station revealing that the killer was actually Marie the whole time, that she's been suffering from a sort of psychotic break and enacting all this violence herself through some imagined persona.  It's one of those reveals that works really well in the moment, but quickly falls apart the more you mull it over.  Obvious cracks appear, like where did the truck come from in the first place?  And, for that matter, what the hell was with that truly bizarre non-sequitur in the film's opening moments, in which the hillbilly is introduced sitting in his truck nearby Alex's home hours before the girls even arrive?  Sure, the fact that he's jerking off into a goddamn severed head is disgusting and certainly makes for a memorable moment, but once you have all the pieces it makes no sense whatsoever.

Even still, Aja direction is so strong and Cecile De France's* performance as Marie is so fantastic, both as a kickass final girl and as a creepy as hell psychopath (that final shot is a doozy), that I kind of don't care.  It's such an enjoyable ride in the moment that I can't help but love it, and the way the film's opening scene is reframed at the end is exactly the kind of thing I'm always a big sucker for.  (One of this year's Oscar contenders pulls off the same trick beautifully, although I won't reveal which one for those who are still playing awards season catch-up.)  I fear that High Tension might be a bit of a one-shot deal, that without the element of the unknown to maintain the audience's anxiety, the film might not be nearly so much fun.  Nonetheless, I look forward to revisiting it a few months down the road to see how well it holds up.

What's The Connection? - Both Crazy Love and High Tension depict a character driven to acts of insane violence in the name of love/infatuation.

Up Next - A Serbian Film



*I couldn't place why Cecile De France looked so familiar as I was watching the film, but when I looked her up I realized that she also played Isabelle, the lesbian in L'Auberge Espagnole.


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Title: Haute Tension (High Tension)
Director: Alexandre Aja
Starring: Cecile De France, Maiwenn, Philippe Nahon, Franck Khalfoun, Andrei Finti, Oana Pellea
Year Of Release: 2003
Viewing Method: Netflix DVD