Take `The Clockwork Orange', add `Trainspotting', add `Once Upon a Time in America'...Throw away all the cinema glamour. Add harsh reality. I do not know what you will get as a result and I can't promise you it will be something good. But if you are Srjan Dragoevic, you will get `Rane' and it will be breathtaking.
I've watched tonns of various movies - & felt like nothing could impress, thrill or shock me - till I've discovered Yugoslavian/postYugoslavian cinema. Black humor. Real passion. Authentic - might be the best definition. The characters are a l i v e and you just wonder how the director managed to put so much pieces of real life inside the picture. What other cinema schools tried to archieve through `experiments' - like Dogma for example - that is to say by inventing boarders, limits & rules for itself - those Yugoslavs did or do by working in often ordinary, may be even classic way - and the main trick is that they seem to have no boarders! The movies I've watched were dark but still they never lacked `lust for life'. Yugoslavian cinema seems to have national specific but always keeps in mind the best examples of European/American cinema. Almost all listed above refers to `Rane'. Mix `Trainspotting' with `Clockwork orange' add a little bit of `Once upon a time in America' & put it on the streets of Belgrade of the nineteth...Take two teenagers who do not know any reality except hatred, violence, crime & poverty - and put them inside the story. One of the most bizzare things for me was - how it reminds the Russia of the early ninteth - rapid inflation, depression & political madness. Two main characters are the guys from my area. It makes me wonder - why former Yugoslavian directors managed to make a number of brilliant movies - trying to expalin what is happening - during extremely hard times - while Russia hadn't already produced even a single good & honest movie about what is happening in Chechnya? Well may be one or two but it is still doubtfull. That's a shame.
