Cabaret Balkan

There's not an ounce of cuddliness to be found in Goran Paskaljevic's incendiary, punishingly bleak, Belgrade-set Cabaret Balkan, originally and appropriately titled The Powder Keg; unfortunately, there's not an ounce of insight into the national character, either, although a portrait of a community in war-torn crisis is clearly what everybody involved had in mind. The movie takes place over the course of a single night, and is essentially plotless, yet there are enough incidents of casual violence to fuel at least three of Steven Seagal's environmentally-conscious action flicks; whenever two people meet, you can feel reasonably confident that one or both of them will be dead or wounded, or at the very least threatened with grievous bodily harm, in very short order. The screenwriters make a token attempt to create narrative segues, with characters from one episode making a cameo appearance in the next, but the movie is ultimately little more than a series of self-contained, uniformly repulsive blackout sketches, all of which illustrate the same very basic theme: Life in What Used to Be Yugoslavia Sucks, Man. While there are moments of great power throughout, there's no sense of progression or escalation, much less of summation; the movie simply stumbles from one ugly incident to the next, and after a while it begins to feel cheaply cynical rather than deeply concerned. It's also tainted, now and again, by a brand of sadomasochistic machismo that seems to be peculiar to Balkan cinema, in which tough, rugged men's men laugh together and then punch each other brutally in the face (or worse) and then laugh together some more. Here, the pugnacity is so relentless that it's the (laughless) audience that winds up feeling pummeled. (M. D'Angelo)