Srdjan Dragojevic’s Pretty Flame, Pretty Village was one of the key films of 90s Balkan cinema. His latest, one of Serbia’s most expensive productions to date, is a hugely ambitious World War One drama, with Dušan Kovačević (who wrote Kusturica’s Underground) adapting his own stage play. Set in a village on the Sava River, on Serbia’s border with Austro-Hungary, the film starts in 1912, as two men return from war with Turkey. Losing an arm in battle, Gavrilo turns away from city girl Katarina (Natasa Janjic), who marries his officer Djorje (Lazar Ristovski). Two years later, Djorje is gendarme in the village where Gavrilo is involved in a cross-border smuggling operation. But it’s not long before a bullet fired by the smuggler’s namesake, Gavrilo Princip, sets off World War One, and the village is plunged into the long murky night of war as ominous portents of St George loom in the skies overhead. An ambitious, swaggering blend of Zhivago-esque historical romance and Kusturica-style rural grotesque, this is an atmospheric drama with a moving apocalyptic climax. Historical filmmaking with the grandest of flourishes, St George Shoots the Dragon is, of course, implicitly as much about recent Balkan conflicts as about the past. —bfi
