European Films

The disconnect between what people want from life and what they are dealt by life and the difference -- and, more often than not, the similarities -- between communist and post-communist society and how evil has a similar face in both are recurrent themes in recent films from Eastern Europe, including Palme d'Or winner 4 luni, 3 saptamini si 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) and the harrowing Moarta domnului Lazarescu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu), both from Romania. Klopka similarly depicts a society that might have a surface veneer of Occidental normality to it, but in reality hides the ugly truth that the Balkan Wars might be over but people are not necessarily better off because of it.

The film is set in post-Milosevic Serbia, where some kids want a cell phone and others would be happy washing car windscreens for some change and where a family -- the one with the kid and the cellphone -- is torn to shreds because of the incurable illness of their only child, a young boy. The family’s desperation leads the mother (Natasa Ninkovic, an everyman's Angeline Jolie) to place an advert seeking people willing to donate some money towards the boy’s necessary but criminally expensive treatment abroad. Like in the recent Irina Palm from Sam Garbarski, the ill boy is really a plot convenience that is only needed to push otherwise intelligent people over the threshold and into the devil’s domain, whether it is sex for money in Irina Palm or a killing for money in Klopka (the latter is also a variation on the theme proposed in Ripley's Game).

In both Klopka and Irina Palm, the Faustian pact is proposed by Serbian actor Miki Manojlovic (Kusturica's Zavet / Promise Me This), though Klopka has the inverted trajectory of Irina Palm: it starts off strong and then dwindles. The film's first section, with a suitable ominous score by Mario Schneider and a clever intercutting of scenes on different timelines by editors Marko Glusac and Dejan Urosevic, creates a dark sense of foreboding that deservedly seems to place the film in the territory of a modern-day film noir.

The film also benefits from tightly controlled performances and good father Mladen (Nebojsa Glogovac) seems such a morally upright man caught in such an impossible situation that we even forgive him for directly addressing the camera (cinematograper Aleksandar Ilic plays around a lot with his cameras but has no sense of coherence or style).

But whereas Irina Palm got better and took some unexpected turns as it wore on, Klopka becomes more predictable and bland, finally straying into telenovellas territory when it is revealed that the widow of the finally assassinated man (Anica Dobra, a regular face on German TV) suggests unwittingly to put up her inherited money to finance the operation of the son of her husband’s killer. It seems that though the evils of communism and war have long been traded in for the evils of capitalism, the implausible plot contrivances of some stories are here to stay.

This film was screened as part of the 2007 Transylvania International Film Festival.

This review contains some previously published material.