User Reviews

A service station ("Servisna stanica") is a socialist enterprise consisting of motel and a gas station. The motel is almost always empty, and usually houses the participants of useless symposia. The official restaurant is also empty, but the buffet, rented by Jordan, a cook, is always full of guests, live music and great food. Raka, a waiter, becomes an acting manager of the Service station, and feeling as an important guy, starts with reorganization. As the first act, he closes the buffet and deprives Jordan of stable source of income. Jordan and other employees start a silent strike. At the same time, the general manager of all service stations comes to visit the premise. Who will serve him a gala-diner? Who will marry his daughter? Will Raka become an official station manager?

Surprisingly fresh even today, "There Are No Small Gods" is the best film of the so-called populist light comedy oeuvre, a trend in Serbian film that lasted between 1960-1962. The other films of this type ("Love and Fashion", "The Common Apartment", "The Bag of Luck", as well as disastrous two of "Whistle at Eight" and "Seki Is Rolling, Watch Out!") were usually filled with folksy, but not vulgar humor; they necessarily had the two or three evergreens written by Darko Kraljic; the acting was amazingly performed by first-class comedians like Ckalja, Mija Aleksic or Pavle Vujisic, with the supporting cast regulars like Zarko Mitrovic and Mica Tatic. However, Djukic's comedy is better than those other films primarily because of its humor, which has not run over by time, but also because of the metaphor that criticize a system in which a semi-literate people become senior and change their behavior towards their former cooperatives. Despite this, "There Are No Small Gods" is endlessly optimistic, cheerful, funny, witty, and above all, a positive film throughout whose humor doesn't get old even 50 years after.