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Suburbs

Dir. Vinko Moderndorfer
Slovenia, 2005, 91 mins

Cast: Renato Jencek, Peter Musevski, Jernej Sugman, Silvo Bozic, Tadej Tos, Maja Lesnik, Alenka Cilensek

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The short film, Tango Nero, will be screened with this feature.

Further proof that the most extreme movies often have the blandest sounding titles, Suburbs is a bracingly bleak journey into misogyny, misanthropy and general misery. Sympathetic characters are relegated firmly to the sidelines: Moderndorfer's four protagonists are repellent to a greater or lesser degree, mostly greater. The main character Marjan (Lencer) is an overweight security guard whose wife has just committed suicide. He seeks solace in booze and the company of his three sex-starved, xenophobic pals: they hang out in the local bowling alley, taking up a lane for hours on end without ever bowling any balls (impotence metaphor, anyone?). To spice up their miserable existence, they use Marjan's experience of surveillance cameras to spy on his new neighbours, a randy young couple from an immigrant background.

They also have other means of obtaining their kicks: at around the halfway mark of Suburbs they tie a stray dog to a post in an abandoned building and take turns sniping at it with a double-barrelled shotgun. This is a horrifyingly convincing sequence - so much so that we have sought and received* official confirmation from the producers and the Slovene authorities that no animal was harmed during the making of the film (a disclaimer to this effect appears in the end credits, although only in Slovene). Audiences are nevertheless warned that they may well find this scene distressing.

But Moderndorfer can't be accused of gratuitous nastiness - he's delving deep into the sweaty, vile abyss of human nature: as a contribution to the cinema of ordeal, Suburbs makes its points with appropriate force. As such, he's aligning himself with the likes of Gaspar Noe - though the bowling alley location, and the sartorial choices of one of Marjan's pals, suggest that he also has at least one eye on the Coen Brothers' rather more benign The Big Lebowski. Frank Mangus

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