Crime Scene is a monthly Vague Visages column about the relationship between crime cinema and movie locations. VV’s Strangler vs. Strangler essay contains spoilers. Slobodan Šijan’s 1984 film features Taško Načić, Nikola Simić and Srđan Šaper. Check out film essays, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings, at the home page.

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Belgraders will never tire of telling you that the city has been burned down and razed to the ground over 40 times, nor will they tire of telling you (depending on political persuasion) how the city is either a bridge between the East and West — a meeting point between different schools of thought — or the last bastion of Christendom against the Ottoman invaders. Belgrade was the capital of Yugoslavia and its biggest city, but whereas it is undoubtedly the economic center of what is now Serbia, it was never quite the biggest economic engine of Yugoslavia: smaller cities such as Zagreb (the capital of Croatia) and Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia) had a higher GDP per capita. I am generalizing my friends and family from Belgrade, but they are a famously stubborn lot, capable of entitlement, insecurity, cosmopolitanism, conservatism and progressivism all at once, incapable of ever shutting the hell up about Belgrade. They are the New Yorkers of the Balkans.

Intriguingly, Yugoslav cinema rarely utilized Belgrade as a central character, despite the presence of Avala Studios (the country’s most productive film studio). Films were frequently set there, but only occasionally did the city become a star in its own films, beginning primarily with the work of the Yugoslav Black Wave from the 1960s onwards: the omnibus film City (1963, comprised of three shorts by Marko Babac, Vojislav “Kokan” Rakonjac and Živojin Pavlović) digs into the urban alienation caused by the city’s huge postwar expansion; Dušan Makavejev’s Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967) expresses a doomed romance through Belgrade’s mish-mash of architecture. In comparison, the much smaller Sarajevo in Bosnia has a far more distinct cinematic identity, almost always taking a leading role in its own films, whether that be partisan classics like Walter Defends Sarajevo (1972), Palme d’Or winners like When Father Was Away on Business (1985) or the city’s re-emergence from the Bosnian war in The Perfect Circle (1997).

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But Slobodan Šijan’s masterful Strangler vs. Strangler (1984) utilizes Belgrade’s cinematic possibilities to the fullest. The film latches onto the city’s noirish corners, the then-groundbreaking punk/new wave music scene and a typically Balkan sense of black humor to produce a metatextual satire that parodies our desire to consume grisly true crime content about serial killers, long before Netflix cornered that market.

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Strangler vs. Strangler’s punch line is set up by the narrator’s opening monologue, set to a montage of the city streets populated by both “normal” citizens and various outcasts. For a town to become a true metropolis as Belgrade aspires to be, the narrator suggests, it needs to go beyond a rogue’s gallery of perverts and freaks — it needs a true maniac, a serial killer! Enter the protagonist, Pera Mitić, played by legendary Serbian actor Taško Načić, who looks like the Tex Avery cartoon Droopy come to life. He’s a flower seller with an overbearing mother who enters a murderous rage whenever his carnations are rudely rejected by beautiful young women. 

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Pera’s killing streak captures the attention of Spiridon Kopicl (Srdjan Šaper), an up-and-coming rock singer who writes a hit inspired by the slaying. For Yugoslav audiences, Šaper was most well-known as one of the founding members of Idoli — a band that married literacy and art-school stylings to punk-inflected New Wave tunes. Strangler vs. Strangler includes a veritable who’s who of cameos and shout-outs to Yugoslavia’s punk/New Wave scene of the time (Koja, leader of the band Disciplin A Kitschme features prominently). This was a music scene defined in part by its metatextual, highly literate, experimental and yet accessible nature.

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Strangler vs. Strangler sets up a dichotomy between the real killings of Pera and the theatrical re-enactments of Spiridon, whose stage show and persona becomes that of a proto-incel; a shy nerd who can’t seem to express himself around women and who lashes out through misogynistic lyrics. The film exists as a gleeful, Verhoeven-esque satire which has its cake and eats it. Strangler vs. Strangler criticizes the misogynistic tendencies behind the thirst for serial killer/true crime narratives (which overwhelmingly target women) while also gleefully playing up to it and implicating the audience. Visually, the film makes direct references to cinema’s long-standing obsession with evil: aside from an obvious nod to Psycho (1960) with both Pera and Spiridon’s mummy issues, there are references to M (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Third Man (1949) and Don’t Look Now (1973). Key to this motif is the actual geography of Belgrade.

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Belgrade was built and rebuilt by Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, Serb monarchists harking back to Byzantine and Rusophile ideas and Communist functionaries, with each era bearing its own imprint on the location. If you visit the city today, you’ll still notice much of this multi-layered architectural history, even as Belgrade’s current rulers — the Serbian Progressive Party, little more than a bunch of war criminals and mafiosos left over from the Milošević era — undertake the most successful campaign to destroy the area in its two-millennia history. Central Belgrade, built on steep hills overlooking the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, seems to continually fold in on itself through largely Austro-Hungarian architecture with the odd splash of Ottoman influence thrown in. Further south, the hills spread out into suburbs. To the northwest on the other side of the Sava and Danube confluence, where the flat plains of the Vojvodina region begin, is New Belgrade — a pioneering work of architectural imagination where the post-war Communist government built a sea of brutalist high-rises. Each block was intended to include nearly everything one would need to live and raise a family: schools, shops, doctors and leisure areas. Beyond New Belgrade is Zemun, historically a separate town with its own history, but long since swallowed up by Belgrade’s urbanization.

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This sense of a multiplicitous architecture is reflected in Strangler vs. Strangler’s shadowy, expressionistic visual style, which drenches characters in shadows or directs light upon their faces in a way that accentuates the seriocomic features of its actors, whether that be Načić’s sullen puppy dog eyes or Šaper’s awkward gangliness. Few settings are directly referenced, but the hilly terrain on the central and south sides seems to be the primary filming location, using that area’s three-dimensionality to mess with perspective and texture. And the street lights are given this isolatory quality — there’s never enough of them, leaving pools of darkness in the city streets pierced by shards of light, with safety always a few too many meters away. Whether it’s the leafy suburbs, the city center, the draughty shack where the protagonist lives or the disused warehouse where a gig central to the plot takes place, the facades of most buildings are cracked. It’s a city in need of repair, even as it hurtles towards becoming, as the narrator suggests, a fully-fledged metropolis. Belgrade still feels like this, with crumbling and neglected edifices often standing next to gleaming steel-and-glass towers funded by professional money launderers.

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By the early 80s, Šijan was already one of the most successful directors Yugoslavia had ever produced: his two collaborations with screenwriter Dušan Kovačević resulted in Who’s Singin’ Over There? (1980) and The Marathon Family (1982) — strong candidates for the two most universally popular comedies across the former Yugoslavia. Their magic relies on the interplay between Kovačević’s acerbic, semi-conservative bleak view of the Serbian (not Yugoslavian) mentality and Šijan’s post-modern, cinephilic background, having begun as an experimental filmmaker. Strangler vs. Strangler’s metatextual nature and its even bleaker and absurd sense of humor liberates the director and allows him to follow his visual impulses to their macabre ends with a film that’s constantly turning back onto and folding over itself, just like the city itself.

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It is still curious to me that Belgrade has a comparatively minimal screen identity, and yet perhaps Strangler vs. Strangler explains within its text precisely why. This is a city that has always been given to a bullish sense of self-promotion rooted in both genuine avant-garde ideas and a sense of insecurity — close to being a truly global city but never quite there. Belgrade is a location constantly looking to the rest of the world for acknowledgement, cannibalizing, in the case of Strangler vs. Strangler, New Wave ideas and noir (both emerging from the West) to its own ends. So, it makes sense that one of the best films to utilize Belgrade’s unique topography is so metatextual, referential and so willing to use this referentiality in a semi-parodic, furiously comedic manner. Strangler vs. Strangler is somewhere between the avant-garde and the absurd: a perfect description of Belgrade itself.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

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