A Balkan Noir - Smoke In Film Noir
Thoughts On: A Balkan Noir (2017)
Made by Drazen Kuljanin, this is the Montenegrin film of the series.
A Balkan Noir, as you may expect from the title alone, tells a pretty bleak story of doom and misery. Capitalising on visual tropes of the classical noir, awakening and revitalising them in modern digital cinema, director, Kuljanin, brings striking camera-work to the forefront to engage his empty models (it would be a struggle to describe them as characters) with piercing, juddering expressionism. Instantiating realism within a story of winding crime and a dismal chase toward revenge, the montage drifts into patient, hand-held long-takes, pulling the grit out of each performance at times. But, above this, the camera-work and montage push to sustain a consciousness over the film; one that keeps us aware of cinema at work with extra-diegesis and symbolism concerning cigarettes (another iconic trope of the noir) constantly distracting us. This distraction is clearly a conscious technique to overthrow the subjectivity of this narrative - the pain, will and destructive passion of our models - with objectness. So as much as this appears to be a tale of revenge and existential loss spun between a husband, wife and police officer attempting to solve the case of a missing daughter, it refuses to let the audience settle into this and feel their humanity. A Balkan Noir is rather an expression and examination of smoke itself: the cigarette. Presented as more of a narrative film essay, this uses the cigarette as a symbol of film noir to convey the genre's refusal of clarity, and its yearning of clouded perception. Its dark and meaningless world is not one its models wish to resolve or live in, rather escape from and seek levity in. And so it is the cigarette that structures the plot; each one an effort to mask the existential dread and impending disaster of the narrative threads; the act of smoking itself the meaning making process pulling us toward a finite release from fatal trauma. Tough, but technically fascinating, A Balkan Noir lacks affect, but in its emptiness makes an illuminating exploration of smoke in film noir.
