An Aesthetic Kidnapping

Last Friday was opening night of a film festival at our local theater - it seems that the films from the Belgrade festival are making the rounds to the regional theaters. We met up with our friends, bought some popcorn, and went in to see the first film, Broken Flowers. According to the advertisements, the movie was supposed to be followed by some sort of concert.

We took our seats, glad that the theater was moderately full and excited for the movie. Unfortunately, the event organizer had rescheduled the concert to take place before the movie, having realized that no one would stay for the concert or assuming that we wouldn't care/notice.

So what was this concert? A multimedia experience! There were two women on stage, one reading poetry and the other playing the piano. A film was projected behind them, featuring the same woman with the piano (some poor guy had to drag a baby grand up into the hills of Serbia), men in uniform with a huge Serbian flag, and mountain vistas, all intercut with religious icons and scenes of burning buildings. The poetry reading took place during the projection, but the film was paused for the piano playing. Why didn't she play the piano live for the poetry reading/film? I have no answer.

The whole performance had clearly been soaked too long in a big vat of melodrama. The only light came from candles placed all around the piano (except for the lantern in the Chronicles of Narnia display on the other side of the stage) and the women were dressed all in black. The piano player, who was clearly the ringleader, wore some flowy outfit and an oversized black hat. In the film she was wearing a long black veil, fishnet gloves, and bright red lipstick. When she played the piano she had these fantastic arm flourishes that made me think she was trying to combine modern dance with her music. Or that she had some sort of neurological disorder.

Perhaps I'm being too mean, but you have to understand that even under the best of circumstances, I don't like this kind of thing. And the whole audience was basically taken hostage for this performace - we were there to see Broken Flowers, remember? One of our Serbian friends was so embarrased that he sent Dan a text message in apology (he was sitting in a different part of the theater) before walking out. We (as an audience) sat there and took it for over a half hour before people really started getting restless.

It started with general murmuring, then progressed to bursts of applause during the segues from film to performance, with shouts of "Oh! You're not done yet?" Then people started to shout out (I wish I could tell you everything that was said. Alas, language barrier.), and eventually the performance stopped and the piano player had some conversation with the audience about how she had performed in Kragujevac twice before (in 1976 and 1978, I believe) with positive reactions, but that now she was never coming back. This, naturally, resulted in more applause. Somehow they decided they were going to keep performing, although they agreed to cut it short, and within another ten minutes they left the stage.

Part of me feels bad for the performers. I'm sure they believe they have an important message and a quality performance, and no one wants to be ridiculed. But we were victims of a bait and switch, and the audience was polite for quite a while, but who knows how long the show would have gone on for if it hadn't been stopped? And as I have described here before, the chairs in that theater are no La-Z-Boys. I just didn't need the extra time sitting in that seat.

Of course, before starting the movie they had to take down all the equipment from the performance. Dan took the opportunity to stand up and stretch. There was some general shouting from behind us, and Maja turned to talk to the people. She told them that we are Americans, and then one of them said "sit down" in English. Dan responed, in his best Serbian, "But my ass hurts." It was a linguistic triumph.

We finally got the movie after that, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. As for the performance, I'm sure there's an audience out there somewhere for those ladies. Unfortunately, the audience they got last Friday was for Jim Jarmusch. It was nice to see democracy in action.