IT RAINS IN MY VILLAGE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Anticipating numerous exciting films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2012) that are from countries that were once part of the former Yugoslavia, this classic Serbian film is not only worth seeing, but suggests that not much has changed save for the borders.

IN ANTICIPATION OF THIS YEAR'S TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (TIFF 2012) THERE ARE A NUMBER OF EXCITING NEW WORKS FROM COUNTRIES WITHIN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA. HERE'S A REVIEW OF A BLAST FROM THE PAST - A GREAT SERBIAN PICTURE AVAILABLE ON DVD AND MADE MANY YEARS BEFORE THE POST-COMMUNIST STRIFE AND CIVIL WARS. ODDLY, WATCHING THIS CLASSIC FILM NOW AND COMPARING IT TO CONTEMPORARY WORKS FROM THE SAME REGION, ONE MIGHT THINK NOT MUCH HAS REALLY CHANGED AT ALL OTHER THAN A FEW BORDERS.

It Rains In My Village (1969) dir. Aleksandr Petrovic ***1/2
Starring: Ivan Paluch, Annie Girardot, Eva Ras
Review By
Greg Klymkiw

A simple minded young woman begs for food from a rail worker who's been ogling her. Dangling a bit of his lunch as if it were a carrot before a horse, he leads her into a field and rapes her. Later, she staggers through the woods gnawing on a crust of bread and another man drags her into the bushes and rapes her. After satisfying his urges, he takes her to a wedding celebration where she is encouraged to humiliate herself for the amusement of all the townsfolk gathered there and is furthermore urged to humiliate the bride by removing the newly married woman's veil and headpiece and wear it while dancing to the music of a traveling Gypsy folk band. Much later on in the movie, the bruised, bloody, savagely beaten corpse of the same mute, mentally challenged young woman lies on a wooden bench in a filthy shack, her eyes frozen - open in terror - her last emotion before the last beat of her heart.

This is Serbia.

The young woman's name is Goca (Eva Ras) and while she is not the protagonist of Alexandr Petrovic's powerful, semi-neo-realist drama It Rains In My Village, it is her heart and soul that seems most central to the despair related in the narrative.

Telling the simple tale of a handsome, shy swine herder Trijsha (Ivan Paluch) who is drunkenly duped by his equally jack-hammered buddies at the local bar into marrying the mute, mentally challenged Goca, this is a film that never holds back in exposing the brutal, ignorant alcohol-fueled misery of life in a Serbian village in 1968. This is a patriarchal world where women are seen, but not heard - save for their fake cries of ecstasy while being drunkenly ploughed or the cries of pain and terror as they're beaten by their Neanderthal husbands.

Goca, being mute, cannot scream. Her eyes, however, tell tales beyond any words.

Trijsha toils with his herd of swine, spending as much time away from his wife and their eventual newborn child as possible. He spends downtime in the bar, bowling with his buddies on the rickety makeshift alley and drinking.

Always drinking.

Booze is the only thing that seems to numb the pain, but it never really does the trick. Trijsha falls madly in love with Reza (Annie Girardot) the new teacher who comes to town. She's from the city, and unlike the local women, she's her own woman. She takes whomever and whatever she wants - using her beauty and seemingly insatiable appetite for sex. Trijsha's stud qualities keeps her amused for awhile, but when she dumps him for a new succession of suitors, he drinks himself blind, beats his wife to death, drinks more, passes out and allows his elderly father to take the rap for the murder.

Other than booze, the only other thing that seems to mean anything to anyone in the village are the folk songs of their ancestors - played by gypsy musicians at weddings and in the local bar. Folk music fills the open air and permeates the spirits of the men as they continue to lead the brutal, aimless lives.

Though they live under the shadow of Communism, the Orthodox Church still, in its blessed patriarchy, reigns over all and whatever spare money anyone has goes to rebuilding the church - a ramshackle, bombed-out mess from the war. Their pathetic attempts to hold a Communist Party meeting is an excuse to drink and discuss what they need from the party. The needs are for the collective, so to speak, but they're self-serving and certainly no in the supposed spirit of the movement.

The village teems with mud, puddles and pigs (not just the men). Life plods along, punctuated by occasional bursts of violence and the denizens of the village hurling insults at each other - fuelled by macho posturing and, of course, booze. This is life as it was during Communism, but it's obvious it always was this way and would, in fact remain - long after the fall of Communism.

In life, squalor, ignorance and repression breeds more of the same and this is easily one of the most savage indictments of poverty I've ever seen. It's also a raw, unflinching portrait of life in Eastern Europe - a life that is sadly, not much different now. (Hey, it's not just Serbia. Recent trips to Ukraine suggest this way of life permeates many other Slavic countries. Life was always cheap in the "Old Country" and continues thus. Watching this movie made in 1968 shocked me as I felt like I was wandering through villages in contemporary Ukraine.)

Director Petrovic brings his roots in the documentary tradition to full bear in this classic of Eastern European cinema. My longtime e-pal and colleague Michael Brooke recently reminded me of the great Petrovic picture I Even Met Happy Gypsies and how Emir Kusturica owed his entire career to that movie. That is indisputable. Certainly all through It Rains In My Village, Kusturica was always in my mind. God knows I love Kusturica, and It Rains In My Village is a film that had a similar emotional response from me, though frankly, I found it had even more resonance than even my favourite Kusturica Underground. The performances Petrovic elicits in Village aren't pitched as high and, in fact, there are few films that feature a performance as delicate and exquisite as that delivered by Eva Ras as the doomed Goca. For me, it's on a par with some of the best work from Giulietta Masina. Like the aforementioned Petrovic picture I Even Met Happy Gypsies, It Rains In My Village was in competition for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, but seems to be largely forgotten.

This must change.

It Rains In My Village is definitely an important work to be seen. It's available as part of the on-demand MGM Limited Edition Collection DVD-Rs. Its subtitles have been poorly translated and given that folk music is so important to the movie, it's a shame nobody bothered to translate any of the songs sung by the gypsy bands in the film. My knowledge of Ukrainian and Russian are rudimentary enough that I was able to make out the gist of the songs due to the similarity of many words in Serbian, but I know I was missing many of the subtleties and poetic qualities of the lyrics. This movie, if not all of the work by Petrovic deserves better than this and one hopes that wither Criterion or Kino will dive in to the rescue. The picture transfer comes from a mediocre source, but the grain is clearly intentional, so this is not as much an issue.

DRAGAN WENDE - WEST BERLIN Reviewed By Greg Klymkiw - Hot Docs 2012 Must-See #9

Dragan Wende - West Berlin dir. Lena Müller, Dragan von Petrovic, Vuk Maksimovic (co-director and cinematographer) **** Review By Greg Klymkiw

"I said to the guy: 'Pay 99 euros and fuck all day!' If you have no teeth, just lick her pussy." - Dragan Wende, brothel doorman, pimp and dealer in the all-new, reunified Berlin.

For some, the Cold War in Germany was a Golden Age.

There was a West Berlin and an East Berlin.

Life, at least for those in the west, was paradise.


Dragan Wende, a Serbian expatriate brothel doorman, pimp and dealer in Berlin, prefers to describe the occupied Germany in strictly anatomical terms: "America had the left side of the bum. The Russians had the right side of the bum."

Those lucky enough to reside on the non-communist side of the city lived La Dolce Vita - profiting both legally, and in Dragan's case, mostly illegally. According to Dragan, he and others like him were "the asshole inside."

Wistfully, but with a touch of bitterness over the eventual Reunification of Germany after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down November 9, 1989, he declares: "But we were living! I lived like Count Yorga The Vampire [the famed 70s B-movie character, an undead Baltic nobleman with a penchant for the blood of virgins]. We had everything - clothes, cash and girls. Everything was beautiful. Just look now!"

The "now" he refers to is the life he currently leads in the contemporary, reunified Berlin. Standing outside bordellos and earning a commission for every gentleman he sends into the dens of carnal delights is a far cry from those days in the 70s when he engaged in all manner of fraudulent activity and practically lived in all the hot nightclubs. Dragan worked for multi-millionaire playboy Rolf Eden and was instrumental in helping to build Eden's empire of discotheques, strip clubs and brothels.

In terms of his activities in such time-honoured traditions as black market profiteering and outright financial fraud in occupied and/or war-torn countries, Dragan was especially successful as he and his cohorts from the "old country" held the most valued passport in all of Europe, if not the world. As a Serb from the former Yugoslavia, he had easy access to both East and West thanks to General Tito's brilliant emphasis upon neutrality and the fact that neither communist nor democratic regimes required a visa from Yugoslav nationals.

Dragan had access to a revolving door for any and all illicit activities he chose to engage in. Alas, as (bad)luck would have it - two tragedies occurred. Number one, his partner in a $250 million swindle died, taking the final digits of a Swiss bank account with him to Heaven. Or Hell. Dragan held the first few digits, but without the rest, he was unable, nor will he ever be able to get his mitts on the dough. Number two tragedy - Reunification and the fall of Communism.

For millions, life would change for the better, but for many millions more (most of whom were not criminals), life changed for the worst. Dragan could, perhaps, have moved into more extreme areas of criminal activity - the gangsterism that permeates Eastern Europe in far more insidious ways than Communism ever did - but he never saw himself in those terms. To him, he conducted business and it was the business he knew best. He was a master hustler, but hardly a gun-toting thug.

For Vuk Maksimovic, a burgeoning cinematographer in Serbia, Dragan was this legendary Uncle who lived the high life in Berlin. Vuk's whole life was permeated with tales of this high-rolling blood relative. He wanted to get to know his Uncle Dragan. Armed with two cameras and two trusted colleagues, producers and co-directors Lena Müller and Dragan von Petrovic, Maksimovic and team fashioned Dragan Wende - West Berlin which is easily one of the most original, entertaining and penetrating documentaries about the wild days of pre-and-post communist society.

Capturing Vuk's visit with Dragan (replete with tours of the now-gentrified former hotspots of Berlin, life in the brothels and interviews of former partners-in-hustling), the film blends all of this with a series of brilliant films within the film - mock 70s-style docs detailing Dragan's past with the history of a vibrant, long-dead way of life.

This compelling approach to documentary storytelling is a strange and dazzling display of direct cinema that bounces between a cinéma vérité approach to the squalid reality of Dragan's contemporary life, punctuated by garish 70s archival footage assembled like a weird combination of straight-up TV documentary of the period and the 30s/40s-styled Warner Brothers montages (often fashioned by the likes of Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Wise).

Most of all, though, it is a documentary that feels very close to the world etched by John Cassavetes in his stunning crime drama The Killing of a Chinese Bookie or, for that matter, in Peter Bogdanovich's magnificent adaptation of Paul Theroux's Saint Jack - but here, Dragan is a real-life version of the characters played by Ben Gazzara in both films - sleazy, charming, corrupt, living on past glories and yet, so very, very cool.

Dragan's constant refrain throughout the film is: "Man, I'd give anything not to work today."

Thankfully, he does. And when he doesn't, he gets his nephew Vuk to take his place as a brother door manager. All filmmakers, in one way or another are glorified pimps. This movie might be a first, though. The pimping is not only metaphorical, but literal.

This, of course, is the stuff of great cinema.

"Dragan Wende - West Berlin" is playing Sat, Apr 28 9:00 PM at TIFF Bell Lightbox 3 and Sun, Apr 29 4:14 PM at the Cumberland 2 during Toronto's Hot Docs Film Festival. To get tickets, visit the Hot Docs website HERE.