to gather together a sufficient number of people. The film has a catharsis that people know from folk poetry, a tragic end with a lot of humour prior to that. The film is full of metaphors, associati- ons and quotations from great works of film and literature... - This film is based, among other things, on something that is very powerful, and that is the literature of Faulkner [American au- thor William Faulkner, 1897-1962]. This re- lates to his story in which a lawyer is in love with a woman who becomes pregnant and he, at a time when abortions were banned, takes her to get an abortion. She dies, and he doesn’t kill himself only because he is a Catholic, so suicide is forbidden. Moreover, he also had that idea - if I kill myself, who will remember that woman and that love? That is a sentence, I believe, every contem- porary writer would agree with. And I con- verted it from literature to film. One gets the impression, however, that the biggest loser in the film is the cha- racter of Milena. As Ljuba Simović wo- uld say in “Šopalovići”, for her “an ac- cident happened for nothing”… - She is an ancient hero. She makes the wrong move at a certain point which caus-
es everything to move into tragedy. That is an ancient recipe - there is a character who pulls a trigger and draws us all into tragedy. An extremely strong segment of the film is the war milieu of the 1990s in this region, the war story. Is this film also your anti-war manifesto? -That’sbecauseourlivesweresqueezed, conditioned and deformed by wars. We have always fought wars never really knowing why we are fighting them. Great powers fight to expand their territory and for plunder. It started with oil and gold and today it is vir- tually the same, only it has a new name. It is no longer countries, but rather corpora- tions that use a country. And we, as Andrić says, have always been at war. Andrić says of wars in the Balkans that they always start from the outside and when they’re over we don’t know why we were at war, but already bythenextwarwehavearousednewthemes and new motives that we will resolve in the war that follows after that. And what’s happening now? How do you see the current situation? - Again we are in some very complicat- ed situation where the starting point is very uncertain. What will happen to us? It is com- pletely uncertain.
brought to a conclusion, but rather lives to the end of their lives. Isn’t that love in the film more than ma- le-female relationships? Isn’t it actu- ally also a way of thinking, an attitu- de towards the world? - That’s right. Love also as a defence against a world that is collapsing. And here that love is in all its glory, in full swing, and it has begun to share with the world’s audi- ences that grain of excitement. I think that in Belgrade and in Serbia we have a chance
| 103
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator