Who's Singin' Over There? (1981)

Best Yugoslavian film ever made. Brilliantly simple but then again extreamley interesting piece of pure genius!

Moving over to ICM after IMDb stupidly shut the message boards down,I took a look at the Challenges page. Among the year-long challenges,I noticed an exciting "exchange" project,which led to me finding out who's singing over there.The plot:A day before the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia takes place, Aleksa Simic, Lovac, Brka, Celavi,a newly wed couple and a budding singer get aboard Mr. Krstić old,pig farm bus and head for Belgrade. Initially finding a flat tire and a damaged bridge to be forks in the road,the group soon find themselves taking a detour into an unfolding invasion. View on the film:Broadly drawing each passenger,the screenplay by Dusan Kovacevic drives the group down a dry wit folk tale path,where Simic's honour of being a WWI vet and Brka's Germanophile and others creates A Canterbury Tale sense of each of them revealing their backgrounds via stories,as they drive into oncoming history. Taking the wheels off the bus with a deliciously dark satirical explosion, Kovacevic cleverly captures the attempt of the newlyweds to live a normal life under the fog of war,whilst ruthlessly slicing into the "troubled" history of Yugoslavia,emphasised in Brka being given the speaking style/manner of WWII PM of Yugoslavia/Axis puppet Milan Stojadinović.Driving down the rickety roads of the Balkans,director Slobodan Sijan & cinematographer get under the daily grind of the characters with a rustic green and yellow appearance casting a folk atmosphere over the movie. Conjuring up a touch of excellent absurdist comedy, Sijan brings a Greek Chorus on board,as the passengers look over to find out who's singing over there.

Actually I'm surprised there were so many comments about this movie. I saw it as part of a Slavic film festival at a major American University. But nobody in USA has heard of it, which is a real shame! The dynamics between the people are what makes it both funny and sad. They are stuck together on a long bus trip--someplace most of us have been!! But I never had one like this!! My favorite scene is the one where they stop for the funeral. Then the man & woman sneak off for some Lovemaking in the forest but everybody follows them to watch without them knowing! Just as she raises her skirt and he enters her all the way--the consumptive starts hacking & they realize everybody is watching!! Talk about surprised! But...you really have to feel for them even if it is hilariously funny! When you see the ending it is sort of ironic that they enjoyed themselves while they did! Serb humor at it's best!

Superbly developed characters into the lots of funny situations full of spirit, absurdness and Serbian mentality. Movie is a great comedy, enjoyable, interesting, unpredictable. Best point in a film: characters, then humor itself, story and dialogs. Humor has 'inner development' , rare in Serbian movies. So, it is consequence of characterization, is well motivated, spontaneous and cogent. Also it is sharp, intelligent and lucid. Most of the movies, unfortunately, had constructed humor (devise a joke and put it into a characters's mouth) or ordinary situation comedy, burlesque, farce. Some of the 'art immortality' are incorporated in this movie. Little masterpiece, hardly reachable.