Cabaret Balkan should be an excellent film. Unfortunately I found it way too uneven, redundant and emotionally distant to be entirely successful. Surprising to me is that it seems like no critics feel the way I do.
True, there are many moments of haunting brilliance, scenes that should stain the mind with their lasting impressions. The problem lies in the filmmakers overextending themselves and not allowing the madness and pain to play the realm of suggestion as much as it does concrete images. So many of the vignettes stretched on too long. Instead ending on the most powerful note, they lasted five or ten minutes longer, reducing the whole to a rather mundane mixture of hoodlum hijinx and human stupidity. I found my screaming at the screen on quite a few occasions, "CUT-YOU'VE MADE YOUR POINT!"
EX: In Kurosawa's RAN(1985), the most chilling vision was not of massacres, the various characters plotting and backstabbing each other, or the thousands of dying warriors sprawled out in the fields of war. Rather it was the moment when the elderly lord sat down, silent, broken and strangely alien the surrounding violence, to realize what in fact he had caused.I believe this was something near the intent of Cabaret Balkan, unfortunately it was overstated rather than understood. It's easy to illustrate madness, violence, and evil. It's much harder to make us care about it.
And yet, after saying all this, I still WANT to like this movie. I would love to see this film re-edited to play up to the most powerful moments, allowing the characters to act truly irrational and unexplained, to allow the violence to really rub raw nerves. As it stands now, it's too easy to dismiss the actions of the characters.
True, there are many moments of haunting brilliance, scenes that should stain the mind with their lasting impressions. The problem lies in the filmmakers overextending themselves and not allowing the madness and pain to play the realm of suggestion as much as it does concrete images. So many of the vignettes stretched on too long. Instead ending on the most powerful note, they lasted five or ten minutes longer, reducing the whole to a rather mundane mixture of hoodlum hijinx and human stupidity. I found my screaming at the screen on quite a few occasions, "CUT-YOU'VE MADE YOUR POINT!"
EX: In Kurosawa's RAN(1985), the most chilling vision was not of massacres, the various characters plotting and backstabbing each other, or the thousands of dying warriors sprawled out in the fields of war. Rather it was the moment when the elderly lord sat down, silent, broken and strangely alien the surrounding violence, to realize what in fact he had caused.I believe this was something near the intent of Cabaret Balkan, unfortunately it was overstated rather than understood. It's easy to illustrate madness, violence, and evil. It's much harder to make us care about it.
And yet, after saying all this, I still WANT to like this movie. I would love to see this film re-edited to play up to the most powerful moments, allowing the characters to act truly irrational and unexplained, to allow the violence to really rub raw nerves. As it stands now, it's too easy to dismiss the actions of the characters.