Pretty Village, Pretty Flame

The Serbian equivalent of Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet, this terrific but little-seen movie tosses a conveniently diverse group of soldiers into a tight corner and demonstrates via their predicament that war is hell. You've seen this story before, but never quite like this; director Srdjan Dragojevic expertly juggles four different time frames, using their juxtaposition to provide an emotional and narrative impact that linearity couldn't begin to approach. Oh, and did I mention that this grim, harrowing, ugly depiction of man's inhumanity to man is also intermittently flat-out hilarious? It's true that in order to fully appreciate it, you'll need to temporarily accept, and even sympathize with, its somewhat troublesome worldview--Pretty Village demonizes and/or objectifies the Muslims in the same way that even the most liberal American films about the Vietnam War demonize and/or objectify the Vietnamese--but if you're willing and able to indulge in a bit of mild doublethink (and "mild" is the correct adjective; Muslims exist in the film mostly as offscreen voices, and the film is offensive only by omission), you'll enjoy the most riveting and hallucinatory war film since Apocalypse Now. Highly recommended. (M D'Angelo)