The memory of Slobodan Milosevic hasn't been exorcised. The alleged war criminal General Mladic has never been arrested. In some eyes, after the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Serbia is still a pariah state. There is a feeling of nihilistic self-loathing that runs through the film. However, the juxtaposition of children with such exploitative imagery is itself deeply unsettling. Spasojevic clearly didn't expose these children directly to images of torture, rape and death. It's the fact that children are involved. What has proved alarming to censors isn't just the imagery. The film's British sales agent was left hurriedly trying to clear up the pool of blood. One US distributor fainted as he tried to leave a screening of A Serbian Film earlier this year, hit his head on the door and ended up needing stitches.
What begins as a self-reflexive formal exercise veers off in another direction altogether. The problem is that the storytelling grows ever more intense. As in Peter Greenaway's The Baby of Macôn, he is using extreme imagery for polemical purposes. As in Michael Haneke's films, the director seems to be challenging the audience to question their own voyeuristic instincts. Forty years after A Clockwork Orange, audiences are surely too used to these kind of shock tactics to be affected by them – or so we might think. In the film-within-a-film, Vukmir, the psychiatrist-turned-porn director, may be striving for the ultimate realism but Spasojevic heightens the absurdity. The most notorious scenes (the rape of the new-born baby, the scene in which the star decapitates a woman and continues to have sex with her headless torso) are grotesque but very obviously contrived. The film-making is stylised and self-conscious. That, though, is not the same as saying that it is a repellent film. Much of the imagery in A Serbian Film is indeed quite repellent.
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