The Load (Teret)

THE LOAD (Teret)                B+                  

Serbia  France  Croatia  Iran Qatar (98 mi)  2018  d: Ognjen Glavonić

A bleak look back at the Serbian/Kosovo conflict of 1999, brilliantly filmed by Tatjana Krstevski, densely atmospheric, opening with the night sky on the mountains lit by anti-aircraft fire and the sound of bombs dropping from the sky during the daily rounds of NATO bombing.  What began as a Serbian military venture of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo only escalates in scale, where the entire Serbian country is suddenly engulfed in a war zone, where there is no democratic input from citizens whose voices are muted, with no one asking for their opinion, where the entire nation is blanketed under an oppressive silence that remains even decades after the war, with no one talking about it, at the time reflecting a normalization of war, capturing a mood where there is no escape from the paranoia and fear of daily living.  According to the director, mass graves were discovered in 2001 just ten miles from his home in Batajnica, a suburb of Belgrade, where 750 bodies of civilians were buried, 75 of which were children younger than 16.  From this stark revelation comes an existential road movie that premiered at Cannes in the Director’s Fortnight, made without an ounce of pretension, a day in the life of an everyman, Vlada (Leon Lučev), a beleaguered middle-aged factory worker recently laid off when the plant closed down, forced to find alternative means of support for his family, resorting to clandestine missions driving a transport truck back and forth between Kosovo and Belgrade.  Receiving explicit instructions by Serbian military officials not to view the contents of their cargo, or make any stops along the road, making sure they avoid drawing attention, where drivers are paid upon delivery with no questions asked.  It’s a morally ambiguous assignment, but a man’s got to do what’s necessary to survive.  Alone in his truck, it’s a precarious journey, weaving his way through narrow mountainous roads that come under attack, with anxious thoughts running through his mind, alarmed by eerie sounds coming from the back that evoke suspicion, creating a feeling of unease that never relents, digging deeper into his already burdened subconscious, stopping intermittently to call his wife about medical tests, where each stop becomes significant, particularly in light of his instructions, adding an underling element of tension that is everpresent, where he is a stand-in for what everyone in the country is going through, deeply suspicious of what they’re officially told, developing an inherent distrust for authorities.  This apprehensive mindset becomes a cultural phenomenon that spreads throughout the nation, a burden they all carry, crossing through multiple generations, though no one ever mentions it, avoiding direct contact with each other, where the title itself becomes an underlying metaphor for the film.  

Ostensibly a suspense thriller, the film is notable for no action sequences, no graphic war imagery except for the lights flashing over the distant hills, becoming instead a lingering interior odyssey that develops sequentially, growing more intense by the end, leaving audiences perplexed, yet also mesmerized by what transpires.  Initially encountering a blocked bridge from several burning vehicles at the entrance, which may have been targeted by air, but all that really matters is he can’t cross, requiring an alternative route, stopping where a group of men have gathered asking for directions.  No one is initially forthcoming, staring at him as an outsider, until one man recommends the “the old road,” not exactly providing detail, but it’s a start.  A young kid promises to show him the way if he’ll give him a ride to Belgrade, but Vlada defers, preferring to go it alone, pressing ahead with caution until noticing something in his side mirror, which turns out to be the kid holding onto the back, riding like an unseen stowaway for untold miles.  Asking to sit inside, away from the cold, this teenage kid turns out to be Paja (Pavle Čemerikić), playing him a tape from his band, though they’ve already broken up when the guitar player moved away.  Neither has much to say, but the kid reminds him of his own son, claiming he’d be worried to discover he was out on the road alone.  As it turns out, both have “old-school” fathers, guys who served in earlier wars, in what is described as “different times,” both exceedingly hard on their sons, with Vlada coming to appreciate the hard life his father led and the sacrifices he made, while Paja is fleeing from his family, hoping to find a better life in Germany, where his goal is to start a new band.  Making a quick stop to call his wife, the kid steps out to take a pee, allowing delinquent kids to break into the truck and take his cigarettes and lighter, a gift his father gave to him, but the kids escape into the woods, finding shelter in a mysterious WWII War Memorial, with Vlada unsuccessfully giving chase, losing a precious gift that meant something only to him, revealing the story later in the film of how it was given to him, though the transgressors are clueless, likely tossing it away.  This single act expresses the personalization of meaning, showing how memory is individualized, mirroring the conflicted Serbian consciousness and the effects of blatant historical revision, with the state offering competing narratives, as if they can institutionally eradicate war crimes and erase them from memory.  Serbian prime minister Ana Brnabić still refuses to acknowledge acts of genocide (Serbian PM Ana Brnabic: Srebrenica ′a terrible crime,′ not ...), with Milošević’s former ministers still holding positions of power with hard-right views now representing the political mainstream, leaving a nation demoralized and collectively traumatized from guilt by association, left adrift in a fog of delusion.  Until the nation can publicly own up to their role in what happened and bring it to light, a disgusted public will feel the lingering effects of ostracization and social dysfunction, where each has their own way of processing this memory and passing on its significance to the next generation.   

What’s unique about the film is how it continuously probes under the surface, growing surreal at one point when a stop for coffee breaks out into a boisterous wedding party, with a melancholic song about a “dawn without a sun,” wistfully hoping to “Take me away from here,” suggesting they leave this place behind and move somewhere far away, where this promise of something new alerts viewers to the poisoned grounds of the nation, where unspoken historical events have stained any possibility for growth, becoming a lament, a depository for lost hopes and dreams.  Whatever nationalistic aspirations started this war have left a besieged nation dealing with the scarred consequences, still not speaking openly about what occurred twenty years later, burying their own history, blurring the lines of truth, where each individual must go it alone to seek enlightenment.  Everyone seems to know, but no one is allowed to speak of it, where this film becomes a wordless exposé, a turning of the page, allowing viewers a glimpse into the past, but it remains poetically shrouded in ambiguity and allegory.  The film recalls Nebojsa Slijepčević’s documentary on the filming of a controversial play by Bosnian theater director working in Croatia, Oliver Frljić, entitled Srbenka (2018), where Croatian war atrocities are publicly revealed before Croatian audiences, having significant impact, as consequences still ensue along with a blistering hatred for Serbs, where these issues are only exacerbated and haven’t even begun to heal.  Similarly, Vlada drops off Paja before arriving well past all the other transport trucks, sent into the closed administrative offices for his payment.  Late at night, mostly in the dark, this plays out like a haunted house, nearly tripping over a large bust of Slobodan Milošević (who died in 2006 during a lengthy war crimes trial prior to a rendered verdict), who hovers like a ghost, tainting everything he touched, where the nation still hasn’t risen from the ashes of his legacy, still inhabiting the ruins of what he destroyed.  When the wretched contents of his truck are revealed, with unseen bodies buried by excavating equipment in the middle of the night, just the foul odor alone sickens him, ordered to clean up the truck afterwards, where the water actually serves as an ethnic cleansing, literally wiping all the sins away, finally realizing his mission is basically an undercover clean-up operation that attempts to erase any evidence of war crimes committed by the police or military forces.  By the time he gets back to his wife and teenaged son, he has a different perspective (the camera as well becomes more deliberately explorative), something that can’t exactly be shared, so instead he tells the story of the lighter to his son, a poignant moment fraught with meaning, given to his father on the 15th anniversary commemorating a notorious WWII battle where his father and uncle joined the partisans to fight the fascists, whose heroism captures the elegiac mourning of war (as opposed to a nation now committing fascist atrocities), but it’s hard to tell if his son understands, more intrigued by the tape his father hands him from Paja, which he listens to with his sister, defiant punk music that screams for liberation, fiercely appropriate for the coming future, blaring over the end credits. 

Note

Interesting comments on the film’s reception in Serbia, taken from the Erik Luers interview with the director from Filmmaker magazine, August 30, 2019, “There Was Almost a Competition to See Who Could Spit on ...  

Filmmaker: How has the film been received back home?

Glavonić: There was a big attack on the film (and on me and on the crew) when it was announced that The Load would premiere in Cannes. Colleagues, tabloids and even politicians took it upon themselves to create this narrative that the film was anti-Serb, that the film was about a crime that didn’t happen and lies like that. They created a narrative that the film shouldn’t exist, even though they themselves had not yet seen it. Their negative campaign lasted for six months until we had the local festival premiere in our country at the end of November 2018. But from May to November, there was almost a competition to see who could spit on the film more and who could say worse things about it. They never saw it! I have a thousand or so pages from Twitter/Facebook/Instagram of people saying awful stuff. There were even two or three reviews of the film by critics who didn’t see it. The union of police were writing to the president and wanting to censor and block the film from being shown. There’d be a campaign from one tabloid every single week for twenty weeks, all for a film they couldn’t bother to see. They were imagining stuff, like, “Oh, they must be being paid by the Muslims” or crazy, crazy things like that. I think someone should make a film or write an essay about how the imaginations of these nationalists work, how they shame something they don’t even have the time to see.

When we finally announced that the film would be screening [locally], the chatter stopped, because everybody could go and see that the previous chatter was all bullshit. We had a great premiere, like six sold-out screenings. However, when we were discussing distribution plans last December, we realized that their shade campaign had actually worked, as now cinemas were afraid to take on the film. Cinemas around the country didn’t want to take the film, because they were afraid that there would be neo-Nazi groups or right-wingers trying to block the screenings. Since most of the theaters are publicly-owned, the theaters were worried that they wouldn’t receive money from the Ministry of Culture in the future if they chose to screen the film. Due to the party that’s in power, they were afraid that they would lose their jobs if they screened the film. In the end, economically, the negative word-of-mouth succeeded and that’s why a lot of people still haven’t seen it. It’s playing in Belgrade for one or two weeks and that’s it. Around Serbia, only two or three towns showed it for more than a week. The rest have been one-off screenings. And in the second biggest city in Serbia, the cinema didn’t want to rent the screening room to us. We were willing to rent it outright for a single screening and they didn’t let us. We took to some guys from outside the city who went on to organize a screening that was full, but then…nothing. 

It’s very sad. I’m sad that many people haven’t seen the film in theaters, even if, yes, they can now find it online (piracy is big in my country). The film is worth seeing in a cinema and, really, with a community. I think it would be especially important in Serbia. Maybe we’ll try again to organize a screening in Serbia, but the problem is that even the cinemas don’t want us to. With that said, the film has played more than 80 festivals and has received 25 awards. On the festival circuit, forty or fifty thousand people in total have seen the film and I’m very happy with how it’s been received.

A War (Krigen)

A WAR (Krigen)          B                  

Denmark  (115 mi)  2015  d:  Tobias Lindholm         Official Facebook

Denmark sent 9,500 military personnel to Afghanistan between January 2002 and July 1, 2013, according to Danish reports, which totals more than 60% of their entire military force, where 42 soldiers were eventually killed, more per capita than any other European country.  Making matters worse, Denmark aired a blockbuster TV drama series that was screened throughout Europe that was entitled The Killing (Forbrydelsen) (2007, 2009, 2012) where in the second season the story veered into a mass cover-up of civilian killings in Afghanistan involving Danish soldiers, which was further accentuated by the release of Janus Metz Pedersen’s incendiary documentary film ARMADILLO (2010) that won the Critic’s Week 1st Place Grand Prize award at Cannes in 2010.  Armadillo was the name of the operating base in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan where the filmmaker spent six months with Danish soldiers who were situated less than a kilometer away from Taliban positions, where at one point they are caught in a hellish firefight with insurgents that was partly filmed by a camera strapped to one soldier’s helmet, where the dire situation they found themselves in only resolved itself following the success of a hand grenade.  What shocked the Danish public were the comments of a young soldier who claimed they were exhilarated afterwards, high on adrenaline, and just sprayed the vicinity with machine-gun fire, killing everyone, wounded or dead, then posed for pictures (reminiscent of Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse) that portrayed themselves as boastful heroes next to piles of dead bodies, which led to a political inquiry and opened up questions back home about the morality of their mission.  While there have been American films depicting the nightmarish psychological effect on soldiers sent to war regions, like Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) and Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s Restrepo (2010), and prior to that, DEER HUNTER (1978), showing the destabilizing effects of the Vietnam War, this is one of the few films depicting what is essentially a Danish view of the war, something not really seen since the devastating ethical dilemma of Susan Bier’s BROTHERS (2004).  As the co-writer of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt (Jagten) (2012) and the writer/director of A Hijacking (Kapringen) (2012), Lindholm has established himself as a guardian of emotional authenticity, never overdramatizing situations that are intensely real and bracingly uncomfortable.  

A welcome relief from the overly simplistic, hero worship trends that have defined American war movies of late, which are little more than patriot adulation, where Michael Bay’s latest, 13 HOURS: THE SECRET SOLDIERS OF BENGHAZI (2016), has been referred to in political debates and played in rented stadiums by Republican candidates running for President (namely Donald Trump in Iowa), generating some chilling comments by Christopher Hooks from Gawker, January 15, 2016, who witnessed the world premiere at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, home of the Dallas Cowboys football team, often referred to as “America’s team,” I Watched Michael Bay's Benghazi Movie at Cowboys Stadium With 30,000 Pissed-Off Patriots:  

Bay has an almost pornographic feel for the physics of modern war: The cartoon arcs of RPGs in flight; the swiveling, passionless eye of a Predator Drone; expensive, bullet-riddled cars careening through city streets; planes and helicopters and technicals and men with guns, all in hues bordering on the psychedelic. But the human element is less firmly in his grasp, and the moral landscape of the movie is poisonous.

In the first decade after 9/11, Hollywood didn’t really know how to handle America’s new wars. To the extent films addressed them at all, they tended to focus on how they damaged ordinary people. Movies like Home of the Brave, In the Valley of Elah, and The Hurt Locker were not uplifting—at their worst, they could be moralizing and turgid. And they were not successful. The broader culture honored the rank-and-file men and women who sacrificed to fight America’s wars: Support the troops.

In the last few years, as the wars changed shape and expanded, a strange thing happened. The culture began to focus not on ordinary soldiers, but on extraordinary ones—Navy SEALs, special forces operators, military contractors. The movies changed—Act of Valor, Lone Survivor, American Sniper. They celebrate heroes, they take place in a vacuum of political context, and they’re hugely profitable. Strangely, they cater to people who think Hollywood hates them. Film studios, suddenly, learned to love the wars.

13 Hours fits neatly in this new genre. It’s a story told from the perspective of men of extraordinary martial prowess in a deeply unfamiliar and hostile place, surrounded by faceless and unknowable enemies, desperate to survive. It’s a siege movie, and the major plot points would make just as much sense if they were transposed to a movie about a zombie attack, or an alien invasion.

Perhaps in response to bombastic Hollywood overkill, this Danish film, among the five finalists in the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars, is instead a more measured and intelligent approach, scrutinizing the effects of the Afghan war on multiple fronts, not just the frontline soldiers, but their families back home, while also evaluating the overall impact this has on a rapidly developing, modern European perspective.  The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been the first wars Denmark has fought since the Second World War, immersing a new generation of youth into combat situations, where families become invested in the wounded or the dead, where in a small nation of 5.5 million, it’s hard not to know someone who was affected.  Using real soldiers instead of extras, Lindholm’s insistence upon unflinching realism places the viewers on the front lines in another film about normal people stuck in abnormal situations.  We see the war largely from the Company commander’s viewpoint, Claus Pedersen (Pilou Asbaek), who’s attempting to establish trust with the locals of Helmand province in a peace-keeping mission, but it’s a difficult proposition, as the villagers are caught in between opposing forces, where they are visited by the Danish NATO peace-keeping forces by day, while the Taliban make threats against them by night.  Even those with good intentions may feel paralyzed, rather than emboldened, by this seemingly futile power struggle.  Early on Claus loses one of his men when a young soldier strays slightly off path and gets blown up by an IED, or hidden roadside bomb that is buried just below the surface.  This has a way of unnerving Claus’s men, in particular one soldier named Lasse (Dulfi Al-Jabouri) who was particularly close to the deceased.  As a way of calming his men down, he steps outside of the commander’s tent and accompanies the men on daily patrols, where his daily presence has a way of reassuring them.  This is ironic, as back home we see his wife Maria (Tuva Novotny) struggle with raising three children alone, especially the oldest son who has been getting into fights at school, clearly missing his father and in need of the same reassuring guidance that Pedersen provides his men.  Despite the distance between them, Claus tries to call home at regular intervals, maintaining personal contact, where there are parallels between the difficulties encountered with communicating with his family and the challenges of maintaining good relations with a local community that is highly suspicious of their presence.  In each case, the family and the villagers get shortchanged, while the soldiers themselves end up being stuck someplace in the middle of nowhere.    

Spending the majority of the time with Pedersen and his unit, they have the feel of familiarity when all hell breaks loose, as the unit comes under attack during a routine patrol, initiated by the deaths of an entire family that was last seen talking to the patrol, setting a trap for their ambush.  With bullets and grenades coming from all sides, Lasse is seriously shot, where they are able to pull him back into the safety of their position while remaining pinned down behind a wall unable to see the source of incoming fire.  Pedersen’s courage under fire is severely tested, as headquarters refuses to send a medical helicopter until they can identify the location of the enemy, while a young man’s life hinges in the balance.  The intensity of the moment is ratcheted up by increasingly claustrophobic, handheld cinematography by Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, where the viewer is pulled directly into the heart of a frenzied battle zone.  With screaming profanity as the only recognizable language in their chaotic predicament, life and death choices have to be made under the worst conditions imaginable.  With no musical cues or heart-thumping beats of percussion, Pedersen orders air support to take out a building compound where they believe the enemy is hidden.  In the aftermath, Lasse receives the necessary medical care and his men get out alive.  But shortly afterwards, his unit receives an unexpected visit from military officers investigating Pedersen’s conduct, where he’s immediately shipped home and charged with killing eight civilians without proper military authorization.  What has been a harrowing story out in the field changes course completely, where instead we get a glimpse of the Danish military court system which is systematically expressed in meticulous detail, instigating a somber reflection and accountability for what seemed like a few crazed moments of nerve-wracking combat.  In stark contrast to American films, which readily resort to exaggerated stereotypical depictions of heroism, accentuating extended battle scenes, this film only spends a few instantaneous moments in furious combat, then spends the rest of the film sorting out the consequences.  Using a cool and detached style reminiscent of Jan Verheyen’s Belgian courtroom drama The Verdict (Het Vonnis) (2013), the court offers what amounts to a truth and reconciliation committee on Europe’s involvement in foreign wars, where what appears to be good intentions eventually becomes a humbling experience that spells disaster.  While Pedersen’s men are present in the courtroom, much like the way police fill courtrooms involving one of their own, it becomes an open-ended yet somewhat absurd question for judges and prosecutors in Copenhagen to grasp the harrowing conditions under which soldiers in Afghanistan operate, where one man can’t be held accountable for the madness of war, yet the film was largely instigated by just such an incident in 2012, Danish officer faces trial over alleged killing of civilian, a case that probably never went to trial.  Instead this is more likely a supposition, asking if preserving the lives of your own men in combat is worth the calculated risk of killing civilians.  Certainly your own men are appreciative and can point to your actions for saving their lives, but those that were killed have families as well, where their perspective often goes unheard.  In this film, at least we consider the far-reaching and long-term consequences, which is certainly a more conscientious and healthy way to approach the subject.