Serbian film, a

If a movie is totally banned in Australia, and needed 49 cuts and more than 4 minutes excised before it could even get an "18" certificate in the UK, one knows it's going to contain an above-average level of simulated sex and/or violence. Deliberately given a bland title by its makers, A Serbian Film is a deliberately black-souled challenge to its audiences, especially to former Yugoslavs.

"It's like a cartoon for grown-ups", the multi-lingual graduate wife of a semi-retired porn star explains to their cherubic four-year-old son when he accidentally watches one of his father's old movies. That one incident captures the mixed tone of the debut feature from director Srdjan Spasojevic: outrageousness with a sense of black humour.

None of the hard-to-pronounce/spell Serbian names of his excellent actors or talented technical crew (lighting, editing, soundtrack and cinematography) will be noted. However, they are part of the rationale the director employs for the making of a very controversial psycho-sexual horror film: his film would help foreign producers appreciate the potential value of working with the Serbian film industry. His main justification for his own exploitative film, expressed in the DVD extra of a post-screening Q&A in London, is that his study of porn film-making reflects the exploitation that the war-weary people of "Serbia and the region" endured for decades, and still experienced.

The story line is brutally realistic fantasy. The happily-married stud (a short flabby actor with presumably fake equine apparatus) is offered big money to star in "artistic pornography" for the export market; his wife agrees and a former female co-star is his trusted go-between. He will not be given a screenplay, being told to follow ear-phoned guidance from the megalomaniac director (a messianic psychologist, former orphanage operator and State Security officer rolled into one epitome of pseudo-benign evil).

The stud's elder brother, a corrupt cop, is jealous of his sibling's life and covets his sister-in-law, as the drugged and hallucinatory stud is forced to realise during the porn film's final day of shooting. By then, the stud has unwittingly buggered his own drugged wife and boy. He'd already seen that his co-star friend had all her teeth ripped out and got choked to death by a goon's cock. Revenge is delivered when the stud fucks the goon to death through an eye socket.

The stud slaughters the director and his goon cameramen, while his wife bludgeons his brother to death, after which he drives her and his child home, where he shoots the three of them, embraced in a bed, with one suicidal bullet. At which point, a new director and crew appear in the bedroom, a goon is instructed to be necrophiliac first with the child, thus leaving the audience with a final reminder of a previous incident in which a large goon had fucked (off-screen) a new-born baby moments after he helped to deliver it (on-screen).

Can a film that's technically superb and more than competently scripted and acted be acceptable if it's fundamentally amoral? Does exquisite use of available light and expressionist sets entitle a horror pseudo-snuff movie to serious consideration? It certainly has validity as a provocative devil's argument for the freedom of creative art, and warrants seeing once. Only once.

[The cuts ordered in the UK are described in detail on movie-censorship.com; they indicate that the British film censors were most concerned that audiences should not think child actors had actually watched simulated sex scenes. A few grisly moments were also trimmed, but the movie's plot developments were not emasculated.]