One of the most exciting programmes at Fantasia this year is its Subversive Serbia, a showcase of a wide variety of aesthetics and styles in the exciting new wave of Serbian filmmakers. It is stuff like this, getting a major coup over other prestige festivals such as Venice, Berlin or Toronto, that makes Fantasia so much more than a simply a fan and genre festival.
Mladen Djordevic's wonderfully transgressive The Life and Death of A Porno Gang is a romantic lust-for-life road movie that happens to be covered in blood, sweat, cum, vomit, and more than a few honest tears. In a roundabout way, the film might almost, but not quite, slot into this movie formula: love and passion broken on the rocks of eastern Europe.
With its grungy near-documentary style, it lies somewhere in between The Misfortunates, Ex-Drummer, and Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie, as some elements seemed to loosely evoke the Otto Muehl segments in the latter. The Life and Death of A Porno Gang manages to tuck some of the more 'it was our time and place' elements away from the obvious.
The story follows Marko, a struggling young director fresh out of film school, as he attempts to combine his passion for genre films with his desire to make something of artistic or political relevance. Finding nobody who seems to understand his vision, he eventually appropriates some money from a pornography producer to shoot a few scenes of a sexual zombie flick involving drug horticulture and political satire. The porn director is none too happy with Marko stealing his actors and his money to make something nobody is interested in.
Violence ensues and pretty soon Marko and his porno-gang, along with his failed-actress girlfriend on the road performing live sex cabaret for small villages far out of Belgrade. The low-rent, but comically broad, shows are well received by some of the more adventerous farmers, for shits and giggles mostly; until say a horse penis is whipped out.
Shock and Awe.
But then the town leaders and sheriffs are out in force with torches and shotguns. Marko may not be living in the lap of luxury, but there is plenty of passionate sex and his autobiographical documentary seems to be coming along just fine.
In watching the
Herschell-Gordon Lewis documentary recently at the festival, John Waters commented (in a talking heads interview) that Splatter and Cutie-Nudie pics were much more fun when it pissed people off. Within
The Life and Death of a Porno Gang, there is certainly outrage generated both in the world of the film and, likely, in any modern viewing audience. But let's face it, in terms of unusual sexual acts, there is little cannot be seen on the internet.
Thus, the story is taken to the next level when a British Journalist offers the troupe to combine their sexual cabaret with snuff filmmaking. He is a devious sort, the clearly Mephistopheles of the film, as he promises Marko both cash (of which the group who are living out of a van are are desperate need) and the potential for great art, 'the impressive junction of creativity and cruelty, Eros and Thanatos and commentary on the fallout of the war and violence of Milošević era and its collapse.
To make it even more palatable, the journalist with designs on being a niche producer, will only provide victims who are willing to be killed; who are either suicidal or are willing to take a large cash stipend to help out with their surviving family members. The individual stories of the snuff victims are as compelling and realized as the stories of each of the troupe members. These are broken people, looking for something, anything to validate life as being more than a bleak struggle. Humour and family (literal or surrogate) can only seem to go so far in abject and insurmountable poverty. It creates humour of the gallows variety.
A signature moment in the film has the gang being violently raped by the local townhall folks, it becomes an inside joke, hysterical laughter in fact, because they know that one of the actors has AIDS and he will be passing it along to his rapist. It's a knee-slapper laced with tears of despair. As the gang begins to disintegrate under the weight of guilt, persecution and perceived absolute failure in the original artistic intent, ("We started this journey to fuck, not to kill!' is a late film lament from one of the troupes actors).
The Life and Death of A Porno Gang layers on an apocalyptic 'live fast die young and leave a good looking corpse,' Bonnie and Clyde romanticism that is especially bleak because the romantic notion of we did our best, fucked it up royalty and regret it with every fibre of our being is played less to be tragic than to be oddly sweet. Can Serbia be born again despite its past sins and wounds? It takes a lot of effort to get to that kind of place, and the film indeed manages it.
Despite its aggressively violent and shocking imagery, high body count and splatter, The Life and Death of a Porno Gang still retains a whole-hearted universal theme: The wrong things we do for the right reasons and the effects (regrets) they have on us for posterity. This makes it simultaneously personal and political.
At the Q&A after the film it was revealed that Synapse Films will be putting out a fully and uncut DVD of The Life and Death of A Porno Gang possibly including Mladen Djordevic's loose documentary, "Made In Serbia" a sort-of prequel doc on the production of Serbian pornography as a supplemental.