Who's Singin' Over There?

<i>Ko to tamo peva?</i> is one of Yugoslavia's film classics. It was shot and released in 1980, but it looks back to a tragic era in the country's history: the opening titles announce that what we will see takes place on 5 April 1941, a date that any Yugoslav at this time would recognize as the day before the German invasion. In a non-descript countryside, a bus stops for a motley crew of passengers all headed for Belgrade. They include a grizzled old WWI veteran (Milivoje "Mića" Tomic), a dandy hoping to audition at a caberet (Dragan Nikolic), a germanophile who may well be a spy (Bata Stojković), and a newlywed couple (Slavko Stimac, Neda Arneric). Also on board are two gypsies (Miodrag and Nenad Kostić) who periodically comment on the action in funny musical interludes. Driving the bus is cranky and sly old man Kstic (Pavle Vuisic) and his manchild son Misko (Aleksandar Bercek). So much of the Yugoslav cinema tradition up to this point had consisted of state-approved World War II films repeatedly underscoring how the brave Yugoslav Partisans beat the Germans through every patriotic Yugoslav banding together regardless of their backgrounds and differences. <i>Ko to tamo peva?</i> upsets this tradition, depicting its cast as a squabbling bunch of cantankerous, greedy, and venial types, every man for himself. Yet, in spite of their dislike for one another, the Serb passengers manage to join together at least to beat up the gypsies. (This is a grim counterpart of the old joke popular in the USSR that "friendship of peoples" -- one of the values proclaimed by the Communist Party -- refers to when e.g. Russians and Georgians join together to beat up some third ethnicity.) As the bus makes its way to the big city, the passengers encounter a series of absurd obstacles a la William Faulkner's novel <i>As I Lay Dying</i>: a funeral, the bus driver's impromptu barbecue, and the Yugoslav army detaining them as suspected spies. It seems like they will never reach Belgrade. But when they do finally make it to the capital, the audience has a surprise in store. The extremely high rating given to this film is mainly due to Serbs and other former Yugoslavs gushing about a beloved classic, perhaps more than it deserves. For viewers outside Yugoslavia, few are likely to get all the references and humour, and so one will probably be so impressed as those reviewers giving this a perfect 10. Still, <i>Ko to tamo peva?</i> may be worth seeing for cinephiles abroad. Much of the comedy does come through. Furthermore, the work of the former Yugoslavia's most internationally acclaimed filmmaker, Emir Kusturica, riffs on some of the gags here. Indeed, the screenplay for this film was written by Dusan Kovacevic, who would eventually collaborate with Kusturica on <i>Underground</i>, and <i>Ko to tamo peva?</i> presents a similar view of the Balkan mentality as a lot of riotous eating, drinking, and dancing as in Kusturica's films.