Degrading rubbish like this should never be made.
The sense of pointlessness lies not just in the fact that there's no story. It's possible to get away with having no story. Rather, every scene is part of some larger story we never see. Take the boxing scene. There's something pleasingly surreal, and yet accurate, about it; it's perfectly paced and the acting is faultless. It forms part of a grim story that I'm not sure I'd like, but at least, in the context of that story, it would pack a wallop. Here it's in limbo. Previous and subsequent scenes don't shed light on the boxing scene - they duplicate it. And really, only two of the countless incidents in the whole film show any kind of creativity and humanity: the boxing scene, and the confrontation between the `street punk' and the ex-policeman. That's all there is of value, and it's not much value. They're fragments of good films that were never made.
Sure, this kind of work has an effect. It's a smorgasbord of things painful to look at: blood, bone-crunching, cocaine-snorting (something I find I simply can't watch), rape, hands bent backwards and rocks to the back of the head. It's impossible to watch the film without wincing at the constant brutality. And yet, so what? There are people who think that anything which "provokes a response" must be great art, but I've never heard anyone actually advance a reason for believing something so ridiculous, especially when the response is as automatic as a wince. I feel as if I've been served sour milk and then been told that I've just drunk something of aesthetic merit - because it made my eyes water.
In Australia "Bure Baruta" went by the name "Cabaret Balkan", a title which makes it all the more clear how much inspiration Dejan Dukovski drew from Bertolt Brecht - and that's not a compliment. It's hard to think of anyone more fatal to imitate than Brecht. Brecht was a writer so talented he sometimes created beautiful parables despite his most earnest, theoretically motivated efforts not to; people who imitate Brecht are never so fortunate. They merely induce headaches.
The sense of pointlessness lies not just in the fact that there's no story. It's possible to get away with having no story. Rather, every scene is part of some larger story we never see. Take the boxing scene. There's something pleasingly surreal, and yet accurate, about it; it's perfectly paced and the acting is faultless. It forms part of a grim story that I'm not sure I'd like, but at least, in the context of that story, it would pack a wallop. Here it's in limbo. Previous and subsequent scenes don't shed light on the boxing scene - they duplicate it. And really, only two of the countless incidents in the whole film show any kind of creativity and humanity: the boxing scene, and the confrontation between the `street punk' and the ex-policeman. That's all there is of value, and it's not much value. They're fragments of good films that were never made.
Sure, this kind of work has an effect. It's a smorgasbord of things painful to look at: blood, bone-crunching, cocaine-snorting (something I find I simply can't watch), rape, hands bent backwards and rocks to the back of the head. It's impossible to watch the film without wincing at the constant brutality. And yet, so what? There are people who think that anything which "provokes a response" must be great art, but I've never heard anyone actually advance a reason for believing something so ridiculous, especially when the response is as automatic as a wince. I feel as if I've been served sour milk and then been told that I've just drunk something of aesthetic merit - because it made my eyes water.
In Australia "Bure Baruta" went by the name "Cabaret Balkan", a title which makes it all the more clear how much inspiration Dejan Dukovski drew from Bertolt Brecht - and that's not a compliment. It's hard to think of anyone more fatal to imitate than Brecht. Brecht was a writer so talented he sometimes created beautiful parables despite his most earnest, theoretically motivated efforts not to; people who imitate Brecht are never so fortunate. They merely induce headaches.