Three movies I almost didn’t see ·
Casino Royale (2006)
After the cinema in my village closed for good, the only option was to go to the nearest big city where we went to high school and watch something there. Me and my best friend were really hyped for the new Bond movie (weird blond guy? a gritty reboot? a couple of Serbian actors? yes please) so we decided to hop on a bus even though we knew it was freezing outside and we’d have to wait for the midnight bus back home.
Unfortunately, it seemed nobody else in Zrenjanin shared our enthusiasm for Kinda Ugly & Short Blond Bond, so we were the only ones in the lobby. The clerk told us they couldn’t play the movie for less than 3 people—they claimed they would spend more money on heating up the room than what the 2 of us would have paid. We offered to simply pay for another ticket and pretend there was somebody with us, but this was a man of principle and wouldn’t even hear about it.
So we went outside and started asking random people in the street if they wanna see the movie for free, our treat. Most of them looked at us really strangely, but then came this one guy in his 40s, carrying groceries. He immediately said yes, didn’t even wait for us to explain what the deal was. We sat together and watched it in silence. We cheered when Serbian actors appeared on screen. We groaned when Mads Mikkelsen hit Daniel Craig’s testicles with a thick rope, which is a thing that for some reason happens in this movie. The movie blew our 18-year-old minds and we never saw that guy again.
Lipstick (1976)
Back in 2021, the Yugoslav Film Archive in Belgrade dedicated an entire week to “rape revenge” movies —a controversial genre popular during second-wave feminism in the 70s, where victims of sexual assault would seek revenge, usually a very violent one.
One of the movies they were showing was LIPSTICK (1976), which follows a fashion model who gets assaulted by her younger sister’s music teacher/experimental music maker. The only thing I knew about it was that the sisters in the movie are played by Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughters and that it looked really intense, so I decided to check it out.
When I arrived at the Film Archive lobby, there was only one patron there: a very old lady in a very cool coat. She was arguing with the box office clerk —apparently, they didn’t want to show the movie because there weren’t enough people. She was thrilled that I came, but it wasn’t enough. Try to guess how many people they wanted in order to show the movie... Deja vu.
In the middle of arguing, a young, cocky projectionist came out of a room next door and started yelling at us. He was explaining how every time they play the tape it wears out a bit and they can’t spend it on just the two of us. He told us we should simply come back when they show the movie again, which will probably happen soon.
But the old lady would not take shit from him: “You only played this movie once, back in 1976, I know because I was there. And I can’t wait another 40 years to see it.” I added that “rape revenge” festivals probably aren’t something that’s going to become a yearly tradition.
He went hysterical, screamed “OKAY FINE I’LL PLAY THE GODDAMN MOVIE”, went back into his room and dramatically slammed the door. Two minutes after we were in our seats, the third patron entered the room. It was a girl who couldn’t have been older than 16. They would have to show the movie anyway.
The movie was so good, I went straight back home, downloaded it from a Russian torrent tracker and watched it again.
Suspiria (1977)
I watched a lot of movies growing up. My father owned a video store when I was still in kindergarten and early elementary school, so I didn’t even have to pay to rent a movie. This was Yugoslavia in the 90s, which meant these weren’t official VHS tapes, just somebody going to movie premieres with a camcorder and secretly taping them.
There were no boxes, and the catalog was a bunch of A4 papers held together with a staple, so the only information you had about a movie was its title. This meant I ended up watching a lot of horror and soft porn, and after a certain point pretty much nothing would surprise me.
But one movie did. I was watching it alone at night and it felt like nothing I’d seen before. The colors were really intense, the music and sounds overwhelming, the tension unbearable. It felt so removed from reality, but that just made it even scarier. At some point, I got too freaked out and had to stop the movie.
I’d think about that movie from time to time, but couldn’t remember anything about it except a couple of images: a young woman running through the woods, some sort of a school or a camp, tents with shadows on them.
I completely forgot about the movie until I was perhaps 25. Somebody recommended Dario Argento’s movies to me, and I randomly decided to start with Suspiria. I felt a really weird deja vu: it was like I’d seen it before, but the images in my head were completely distorted, probably because of the grainy VHS tape, my peanut-sized child brain and the years that had passed.
I finally finished the movie I started watching 20 years ago, and it was a perfect introduction to what’s now one of my favorite movie directors.