Not Your Typical Balkan Crime Movie

Juzni vetar’s promo poster.

On the surface, Milos Avramovic’s Juzni vetar (Southern Wind) is your typical Balkan movie.

This recent Serbian release provides the classic Balkan mix of crime, violence, dysfunctional families, latent homophobia, misogyny, and a ton of profanities. Its characters are flawed, its pace is fast, and its biggest thugs are, of course, Bulgarian.

Yet, Juzni vetar is much more than another “Balkan” movie that romanticizes the toxic stereotypes of our region.

More than 20 years since the 1995 Dayton deal ended the war in Bosnia, ex-Yugoslav filmmakers are now largely free from the (self)-imposed imperative of making war movies.

Having replaced the battlefield with the realm of everyday life, they can no longer escape the fundamental but inherently elusive question: what makes for a good movie?

As Hollywood has taught us, there are two types of movies: those that moralize and those that depict reality. There can be good movies of the first type and bad movies of the second type, and vice versa. The type doesn’t determine the quality.

When it comes to the first type, Serbia has produced some great pictures. One of them is certainly Pored mene (Next to Me; 2015): a movie comprised not of autonomous characters, but of deliberate stereotypes. There is the nerd, the attention queen, the gay guy, the macho guy (who turns out to be closet gay), the IT freak, and the nationalist. And there is nothing wrong with the stereotyping: Pored mene‘s premise is that different types of people should be accepted as who they are – and the premise is successfully delivered.

By contrast, Juzni vetar carries no moral lesson whatever. While each character in Pored mene learns something by the time the movie is over, one can hardly say the same about the thugs in Južni vetar. If anything, they come out of the movie as confident about their misguided ways as ever.

What, then, makes Juzni vetar a good movie? The answer lies in the same strengths that characterize some of the Hollywood champions of the cat-and-mouse genre, including, but not limited to, In the Line of Fire (1993), Training Day (2001), and more recently, the TV show Breaking Bad (2008-13). In these movies, the antihero does not undergo any moral evolution (and even if he does, eventually, like in Breaking Bad, it is too late to do anything about it).

What makes these movies effective – in spite of but also because of their lack of the kind of clear moral lesson increasingly expected of modern cinema – is that they are all rooted in a strong logical symmetry. Juzni vetar is no different.

[SPOILER ALERT: stop reading if you haven’t seen the movie yet]

For starters, Juzni vetar wastes no time in laying out the “fatal flaw” of its main character, Petar Maras, formidably portrayed by rising star Milos Bikovic: his passion for cars. In the first scene, we see him kart racing. A few scenes later, we see a bunch of old toy cars in his room. The frame is immediately set.

Before long, we are also presented with the first high-adrenaline car ride (of many to follow), as Maras and his fellow thugs steal a car from a parking lot and drive it all over Belgrade in reverse gear. It doesn’t take long for the careful viewer to figure out that cars recur so much in this movie that they are bound to prove a crucial Chekhov’s gun for the plot.

We find out one other important thing early on: the boss of the car thieves, Dragoslav “Car” (Dragan Bjelogrlic), has decided to retire from the business.

This clearly constitutes the second Chekhov’s gun of the movie: gang leaders who announce their plans to retire but then fail to do so because of a change in circumstances is a Hollywood trope we have all seen so many times. But this doesn’t become important until much later.

Unsurprisingly, cars quickly become the cornerstone of the plot. When Maras spots a luxurious Mercedes left unattended by its (Bulgarian) driver, who is too busy showering his tawdry-looking girlfriend with compliments, he cannot resist his thug instincts and nicks it in a flash. There are two things he wishes he knew, though. As he is about to find out, the car actually belongs to the king of the Belgrade underworld, Golub(who is brilliantly portrayed by the late Nebojsa Glogovac in his final role). Also, hundreds of thousands of euros’ worth of drugs are hidden in the trunk.

What happens next is the first example of the perfect logical symmetry that runs throughout the movie. All actions have consequences, even more so when there are mob bosses involved. In his first appearance, Golub confronts his Bulgarian employee (whose name is revealed as Hristo) in a dark basement.

He informs him that he is not going to leave the basement until the car is retrieved, which seems like a fair punishment for a reckless mistake that cost Golub hundreds of thousands of euros.

But what disrupts the rational balance of action and reaction here – and on many other occasions throughout the movie – is the emotional recalcitrance of the underworld. When Hristo condescendingly warns Golub that his father will kill him for keeping his son cuffed, Golub brutally murders him by plucking his brains out with a screwdriver. Of course, no Balkan movie director can resist the “delight” of showing a gruesome scene like this close up.

Clearly, there is nothing rational about Golub’s decision, as murdering Hristo brings him no closer to retrieving the car. It does, however, draw him into a completely unwarranted yet extremely dangerous beef with Hristo’s mob boss father.

At first glance, this seems like a convenient escalation of the plot. Yet, there is nothing implausible about a mob boss responding irrationally to what must be the ultimate provocation for a mob boss: the suggestion that someone else is more powerful than him. As he dismembers Hristo’s face, Golub’s proclamation that “[Hristo’s] father’s days have passed” has a petrifying Michael Corleone-style ring to it.

What follows is a fast-paced and beautifully edited cat-and-mouse game that lasts until the end of the movie. While Maras has Golub’s car and drugs, Golub has Maras’s pregnant girlfriend. They both hold solid cards, but it’s about who plays them right. And there are also some other players.

First, Golub is in bed with the city police captain. The captain wants a scapegoat for Hristo’s murder, whose dismembered body (dumped in the woods by Golub’s crew) makes the public – and, more importantly, Hristo’s mob boss father – hungry for answers.

Then there is also Dragoslav “Car”, who doesn’t share Maras’s greed for money: the only thing he wants is to get his protégé out of this alive. There are also other minor characters – not least Maraš’s family, who are used by Golub and the police chief as leverage – but these are the only four players that have the power to shape the outcome of the game.

The character facing the most difficult choice is Maras. At this point, it is difficult to take a side between him and Dragoslav “Car”. On the one hand, the latter is right that Golub is not the kind of person you want to blackmail. On the other hand, Maras has a point when he says that surrendering to Golub peacefully would get him off the hook for the time being, but it would also get him “twenty bullets in [his] chest outside his doorway” in future.

Instead of choosing between bad and worse, Maras avoids having to choose altogether: he cuts a deal, but with the police chief instead of Golub. He then lures Golub and his three-man crew to an empty parking lot on a rainy night, and spectacularly (albeit somewhat implausibly) murders all four of them. Of course, it is the Mercedes that again serves a crucial function to the plot, as he commits the murders with a gun he has previously stashed in one of the wheels.

This outcome makes Golub the biggest loser in the four-way contest: he ends up with no car, no drugs, and dead. As the title suggests, it also makes the police chief the ultimate winner, as he makes a separate deal with the Bulgarian mob boss to continue their drug trade. Yet, this time, it is Dragoslav “Car” who takes over from Golub as their middleman.

The ending makes perfect logical sense. Apart from the somewhat implausible narrative choice of having Maraš murder a mob boss and three of his people all by himself, this is the same resolution we foresaw – or the one we had the tools to foresee – right from the start. The trope of mob bosses who want out of the job but who are forced to stay due to a change of circumstances finally materializesThe reason why Dragoslav “Car” agrees to take over from Golub is because the police chief promises to get Maras a shorter prison sentence. His fate deliberately echoes Michael Corleone’s damning description of the permanence of crime life in The Godfather. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in…

Free of the imposition to provide some kind of grand moral lesson, Južni vetar does a tremendous job of portraying the Belgrade underworld in all its dark and brutal nuances. This is a movie that offers its characters no evolution and no chance for absolution. It is also a movie that delivers a consistent sense of logical symmetry that ticks all the boxes for excellence in the cat-and-mouse genre.

On top, it also contains some less obvious subtleties that are equally imaginative and praiseworthy, especially since they are somewhat uncommon for ex-Yugoslav cinema. The most remarkable example of these subtleties is the effective use of linguistic code-switching between Serbian and Bulgarian in service of the plot.

There are multiple conversations between Serbs and Bulgarians throughout the movie. In the first two, we see Hristo speaking to Golub in (broken) Serbian. The fact that Hristo goes to the trouble of speaking Serbian is meant to implicitly showcase the hierarchy between the two.

This changes, however, when Hristo’s father speaks to Golub a little later. The fact that the father doesn’t say a word in Serbian (the two languages are fairly mutually intelligible) subtly indicates that the power dynamics have changed: these are now two mob bosses speaking on equal terms.

The final use of code-switching in this movie comes with the revelation that the father does, in fact, speak Serbian. When he asks the police chief (in Serbian) to avenge Hristo for him, this is meant to highlight the salience of the moment, as the father wants to make absolutely sure that his wish is understood. Thus, in virtually every Serbian-Bulgarian scene in this movie, the choice of language is intentional and in full service to the plot.

With its powerful demonstration of logical persuasiveness on the one hand and consistent display of creative subtleties on the other, Južni vetar deserves to be remembered as one of the strongest products of the Balkan movie industry in 2018.