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.

Convoy

CONVOY                   C+                  

USA  Great Britain  (110 mi)  1978  ‘Scope  d:  Sam Peckinpah 

After a couple of box office failures, Peckinpah was in no position to haggle with the Hollywood executives, taking a barebones script about runaway truckers armed with CB radios, inspired by the 1975 popular hit song by C.W. McCall, Convoy 1978 movie Theme Song YouTube (4:02).  So in effect, Hollywood was attempting to use Peckinpah to cash in on a recent American CB radio craze which was a precursor to the Internet, as anyone within range could listen in on conversations or get the word out in a hurry warning other truckers of speed traps, police sightings, blocked road construction, or cheap places to eat or buy gas.  After the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo where OPEC producing nations effectively boycotted the United States, the price of oil rose substantially from $3 dollars to $12 dollars per barrel, effectively doubling the real price of crude oil at the refinery level, causing massive shortages in the United States while also generating high inflation rates that persisted until the early 1980’s, with oil prices continuing to rise until the mid 80’s.  In response to this, the U.S. government imposed a nationwide 55 mph speed limit to help reduce fuel shortages, which especially had an impact on independent truckers who were often paid by the mile, so their productivity and potential earnings took a hit, where CB radios were crucial in helping alleviate some of the other unforeseen obstacles, like the presence of corrupt police who typically shake down truckers, threatening to impound their trucks unless a fine is paid.  This opened the door for fast car action comedy hits like SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, the 4th top grossing film of 1977, and The Dukes of Hazzard on TV in 1979, and this film, 12th highest grossing film of the year, making $45 million dollars, contributing to the CB radio craze that took on a life of its own, since it requires no registration fee, where all you need is the equipment to be hooked up.  While there was a small licensing fee, during the height of its popularity in the late 70’s this was routinely ignored, as people used anonymous nicknames called “handles.”  Due to lax enforcement, there was widespread disregard for regulations, allowing people to chat mindlessly with one another, often engaged in tedious exchanges, which also included highly aggressive racist and sexist views, like chat room conversations, often resulting in highly descriptive masturbation fantasies. 

Sure enough, in the opening few minutes of the film, Kris Kristofferson as 18-wheel truck driver “Rubber Duck” is involved in a cat and mouse game of leap frog with a convertible sports car driven by Ali MacGraw, a photojournalist, each passing one another until a policeman stops him for speeding.  Very cleverly, he gives the cop a story about how that female driver up ahead was driving without any panties, which certainly diverts the cop’s attention, as he heads off to arrest the woman.  A word about each of the stars, as both had worked with Peckinpah before, but this time Kristofferson had gotten himself clean and was totally sober, making it harder for the director to work with him, as without the booze and drugs there was little rapport between them, and as for MacGraw, heavily tanned and wearing what appears to be a short afro, one of her worst looks ever, this film really points out her acting deficiencies, where an exasperated Peckinpah wasted valuable time just running the camera, hoping later to find something of value.  The shoot was chaotic anyway, mostly in New Mexico, where half the time the CB radios didn’t even work, with MacGraw’s jealous husband Steve McQueen often intruding, thinking MacGraw was having an affair with someone on the set and making wild death threats, as his marriage was on the rocks, with many days where the raving and near psychotic director was so coked up that he never came out of his trailer, where the assistant director James Coburn actually shot some of the main shooting, with the film going overbudget, largely due to the difficulty lining up such massive vehicles for a second or third shot, which required substantial time and effort, where the script called for using a hundred 18-wheel trucks for a good portion of the film, doubling the initial $6 million dollars and the film went over schedule.  They actually shut down the entire production to allow Kristofferson and his band, seen in the film as the “eleven long-haired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus,” as described in the song, to complete a previously scheduled 30-day tour before resuming filming, where many of the crew simply never returned.  Even worse, the director was so disgusted with the film, shooting nearly three times the footage as The Wild Bunch (1969), where he was known to utter “I haven't done one good day’s work on this whole picture,” that he eventually abandoned the project completely, never able to get the film under three and a half hours, putting the final cut in the hands of the studios to finally complete.  Irrespective of all these problems, it was the highest grossing film in Peckinpah’s career.         

Despite the troubles on the set and the overwhelmingly negative reviews, Peckinpah immersed himself in a love affair with trucks, where more than any movie stars, they were the real stars of this show, where the film excels at glorified stunt driving sequences, including a handful of highly choreographed crashes, where often the thrill is to put the audience into the driver’s seat.  So as a purely adrenaline laced, entertainment venture featuring plenty of trucks and even muscle cars flying through the air, crashing through billboards, the film is a success.  Where it fails is in the human element, as Peckinpah’s idea was to explore the mystique of truck drivers as modern-day cowboys, as if they were the last bastion of freedom on the highways in the American West before the government all but put them out of business.  While the film attempts to build into something of a protest movement, it can never figure out what it’s trying to protest, linking independence and true freedom as outside any collaboration with politicians or a trucker’s union. While it does present the idea that a man alone is not as strong as someone with the force of 100 trucks behind him, this idea degenerates into the mass chaos of an extended wrecking sequence, where trucks simply destroy much of the local property, where instead of a hail of bullets and explosions from a prolonged gunfight, trucks annihilate everything in their path.  It certainly continues Peckinpah’s nihilist themes, but without the poetry behind it.  Only Ernest Borgnine stands out as the indefatigable, trucker-hating sheriff, as his contempt for these lawbreaking “modern cowboys” couldn’t be more devious, pulling out all stops to find a way to stop them in their tracks, where he’s really playing the constantly thwarted coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons, literally rising from the dead on multiple occasions only to pull out more dirty tricks to try and trap them again, always with that gleeful look of anticipation on his face, where the audience, unfortunately for him, continually roots against him.  This kind of cartoon generates a few laughs, offers up some good ol’ boy trucker lore, sounding off on just about everything from Viet Nam to the proposed “double nickel” nationwide speed limit, where giant trucks barreling down the road are seen as an expression of rebellion and defiance of “The Law,” as represented by Borgnine, a guy who routinely shakes down truckers.  It’s a modern American parable of unnecessary government intrusion, where Uncle Sam is seen as dipping into the trucker’s pocketbooks and affecting their livelihood, or so goes the myth, as it was always more about inflation and the unstoppable price of oil from OPEC than anything having to do with the truckers.       

The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur)

THE WAGES OF FEAR (Le Salaire de la Peur)          B+                  

France  Italy  (131 mi)  1953    French restoration (156 mi)  Director’s Cut (148 mi)   

d:  Henri-Georges Clouzot 

In the manner of GREED (1924) or THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), this is a film that pits men against their most primal instincts, themselves, pitiless victims who are tragically unable to control their baser instincts, set against a larger canvas of enveloping darkness that is all but waiting to envelop them—capitalism.  Like an entryway to Hell, the film opens in a godforsaken, backwater town in the middle of nowhere, supposedly somewhere in South America, a place one could legitimately call the end of the road, filled with penniless, out-of-work men, mostly European exiles with expired or non-existing visa’s lining the streets desperate for money and a ticket out of there, instead sitting on their hands in a kind of involuntary purgatory of the down and out, a way station where there’s no telling how long they’ve been stuck there like prisoners.  Set in two parts, where the initial scenes have the claustrophobic feel of men continually getting on each other’s nerves, a hopeless and monotonous life where day after day nothing ever changes, where perhaps the only consolation is the pretty barmaid, played of course, by the director’s wife Véra Clouzot (actually born in Brazil), the object of every man’s desires, yet continually mistreated by the sleazy bar owner who treats her like property and Mario (Yves Montand), who she actually cares for.  When a white-suited big shot from Paris arrives into town, Mr. Jo (Charles Varnel, penniless like the rest of them), milking it for all it’s worth, as yet to be exposed as a fraud, he strikes up a friendship with Mario, as they are both French con men at heart.     

What transpires next is the kicker, as a seedy representative from an American oil company arrives with armed guards and is looking to hire experienced truck drivers for a delicate mission hauling 200 gallons of highly explosive nitroglycerin over 300 miles of rocky, mountainous terrain.  It seems a handful of men have already died and nearly a dozen more injured in a massive oil rig fire, a little known fact the company wants kept secret to avoid a public relations disaster.  More to the point, a.) the oil company has trucks but no shock absorbers or safety equipment, b.) nitroglycerin is highly unstable and explodes if shaken or spilled, but c.) is needed to put out the oil rig fire, as a carefully induced explosion can suck the oxygen out of the fire.  Oh, and the company is willing to pay $2000 to any man who can deliver the goods without getting blown to bits.  Despite being a suicidal mission, every man in town lines up for the job and are angry about being turned away.  The company hires four drivers for two trucks, a Corsican (Yves Montand), a Parisian (Charles Vanel), a German (Peter Van Eyck) and an Italian (Folco Lolli), where those turned away are angry, knowing this is their only ticket out of town, where one of the rejected drivers commits suicide while another may be murdered so that the Parisian can take his place.  From the outset, it’s a dirty business where you have to resort to any means just to have a chance to get yourself killed, and with luck, survive.  The trucks pull out in the dead of night, where what follows is a highly charged suspense thriller where the director delights in placing unforeseen obstacles in their path, upping the ante in exposing just what men are willing to do for the money. 

Turning into a truck lover’s dream, where we follow trucks and nothing but trucks for the last hour and a half, where at any moment catastrophe awaits, this also becomes a battle of nerves and wits that plays out in the minds of the drivers.  Sitting in the self-enclosed driver’s seat, the conversation resembles an existentialist play like Sartre’s No Exit, as you can’t predict what’s in the twisted minds of these desperados, where both sets of drivers maniacally push the other to the limit, introducing daredevil tactics that only tighten the screws of the already unbearable tension, as they continually tempt death throughout the journey.  Adapted by Clouzot and Jérôme Géronimi from the novel by Georges Arnaud, this is a nailbiter of a movie, unusual for the adventure format as mostly nothing happens, but the anticipation cleverly instilled in the audience’s minds is searingly intense.  The bravado of the men comes into play, where Montand turns into a kind of reckless hotshot as his partner Vanel wilts under pressure, visualizing every rock and crevice along the road, while the other pair barely know one another at the outset and are highly suspicious, refusing to be undermined by the other’s lack of will or sheer incompetancy, but become fast friends, brought closer together by sharing the danger and the difficulty, where they eventually learn to respect each another.  Not so Montand and Varnel, where they are continually at odds with one another.  Overwhelmingly bleak and exhausting, the fatalistic atmosphere of doom is everpresent, stuck in one of the more barren landscapes ever devised for a film, occasionally broken up by moments of levity, where a nice touch thrown into the mix is Clouzot’s incessant use of cigarettes, as these guys continually light up in front of such volatile explosives, much like casually smoking around a gas pump, where any spark could set off a massive explosion.  And in this artificially devised waiting game, Clouzot does not disappoint.