February 2007

The Shutka Book of Records (2005, Director: Aleksandar Manic): This month’s Doc Soup screening was one that I’d heard abso­lutely nothing about before­hand. Shutka is a small town in Macedonia that boasts that it is the unof­fi­cial cap­ital of the Roma (Gypsy) people. Though not rich in material goods, its inhab­it­ants are rich in ima­gin­a­tion, and almost everyone pro­claims him­self a “cham­pion” of some­thing. Obscure pur­suits such as hunting vam­pires, training geese to fight, and col­lecting obscure cas­settes of Turkish music are all fair game in the townspeople’s con­stant quest for one-upmanship.

I had some issues with the film’s tone. Even though the film was made in 2005, it was uncan­nily close to some of the scenes of the “Kazakh” vil­lage in Borat. This film, ostens­ibly a doc­u­mentary, also used a slightly com­ical “nar­rator” (actu­ally actor Bajram Severdzan, from Emir Kusturica’s Black Cat, White Cat) and the abundant humour brought it so close to parody at times that I felt that per­haps the whole thing was a put-on. According to the reviewer for the Chicago Tribune, (aptly-named) dir­ector Manic has called it an “acted doc­u­mentary,” which only mud­dies the water.

As well, and as another reviewer noted, there is an unspoken under­tone of grinding poverty. These people, although indom­it­able and at times charming, are the sort of uneducated, super­sti­tious bump­kins who would rather spend their wel­fare money on a lavish party for their son’s cir­cum­cision cere­mony than on his school fees. Though there is a dis­cern­ible Roma cul­ture evident, one won­ders whether it thrives only because of a lack of any altern­ative. Without mean­ingful work or future pro­spects, people are bound to end up spending all of their waking hours boasting, stealing, arguing and wor­rying about evil genies. It’s enter­taining, but it somehow felt wrong to be enter­tained. The few attempts made by the dir­ector to get us to empathize with many of the res­id­ents’ desire to “fly away” to the riches in the West felt buried under the weight of the jaunty anthro­po­lo­gical style (including faux-archival black and white footage). At the end of the film, I felt some­what like I’d emerged from a car­nival sideshow.

(7/10)

Tagged as: borat, gypsies

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