Ordinary People

Written and directed by Vladimir Perisic
(France, Serbia, Switzerland, 2009)

When a movie with Serbian origins opens with soldiers being roused from bed to start their daily duties, we know some awful events are going to unfold. This shocking anti-war movie by Serbian director Vladimir Perisic transcends the standard war movie by becoming a meditation on the twisted side of human nature that war awakens. The baby-faced, teenage protagonist Dzoni (Relja Popovic) joined the army after high school because he couldn’t find a job. By sheer chance, then, his being, his life, his soul went down a certain road where the latent killer in man would be brought out. If he had found a job instead of the army, his life would never have encountered such atrocities and lasting consequences.

The movie takes place in silence, a tense silence in blazing summer heat at an abandoned army base in the middle of nowhere. The seven soldiers who were bused there mill around waiting for orders that are certain to be bad news, since the bus radio had announced “harsh reprisals of terrorists.” The soldiers suspect their lives are linked to the reprisals, but in what way remains a mystery. The silence, oppressive heat, and tedium in the overgrown army base become an irritant, for there’s no way to escape it, to go somewhere else. The soldiers are under orders and the audience is just as captive and restless.

The only sounds are made by humans, such as their crunching footsteps, the lighting of a cigarette, or the arrival or departure of vehicles to the base. Finally the reason for being there takes place, which is best to leave unstated in order to preserve the movie’s impact. Throughout, powerful meanings seep out of the story’s silence: After each event (there are three or four in all), Dzoni stares and thinks, and we stare at him and think. We ruminate on the same things, our memories have the same haunting visions replaying relentlessly. When Dzoni stares at his hands several times, we think as he thinks: these hands of mine did that. His horror is ours, but his is worse for he’s the soldier, by chance.

In the film’s interminable silence we keep pondering: The army is nameless, the war is nameless, the place is nameless. All wars, all atrocities are the same as this nameless war. All good young men who become soldiers like Dzoni have a place deep inside them where the killer-demon lies. What brings it out? When it is self-defense or survival of some sort, the murderous action can be forgiven. But when it’s forced through war atrocities, it becomes the most shocking action imaginable. Such behavior may be forced out of Dzoni, but once it’s unleashed, he becomes the owner and perpetrator of it, which feeds his deep, grieving meditation afterwards, and also ours.

For screening times visit the San Francisco International Film Festival http://fest10.sffs.org

© 2010 Gail Spilsbury, all rights reserved

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