Gordan Mihic

PAGLIACCIO BLUES
(The Beggar's Opera - 2010)

Workers that did not get their wages for six years are lying on the access road to their factory. The factory is in ruins, overgrown with weeds. There are voices that some business tycoon has bought it for next to nothing and that he will soon come to take possession of the facility without any obligations to those that once worked there... Men, women, children, are therefore laying on the road - determined to use their bodies to block the passage to the tycoon and his team...

Thus begins this filmed story, a kind of a "beggar's opera" of our times... No miracle happens, and human bodies are no obstacle today. The tycoon arrives with three dozen goons, removes the blockade and reaches the guard house at the gate, where watchman Dile (55) has been sitting for six years - even though he was left without electricity, water and telephone.

Dile went to "work" not only because he believed that all this will be one day added to his seniority, but also because he has used the guard house for his escapades with various married women, mostly employed in the near-by stores... He's found a justification for such liaisons in the fact that his wife, Savka (55) has given up on life and turned silent ending up in a psychiatric ward... Strong as a bull, Dile desperatly defends his guard house. He manages to beat up half of the tycoon's troopers but, finally, has to leave his "second" home - all covered in bruises...
Fortunately, some time earlier, he had "usurped" a small hangar in which a strange medley of companies once "operated" in adjacent cubicles: a branch office of a bank, a fortune-teller, and quack doctor, the "Eros-Film" productions. Now he lives there with his wife Savka and his son Gruja.
The biggest, dilapidated cubicle, still contains a huge safe without a door that sometimes, for reasons unknown, switches on its panic striking alarm. Whenever this happens, Dile has to jump up and down close to the safe until the alarm is switched off by the vibrations thus produced... This is exactly what has happened just now: Dile has been jumping his heart out, and panting heavily he has to have a few yogurts... There we learn that he secretly believes that under the cap of the yogurt bottles he can find the one with the sign "one million" and thus become the grand winner of the "Million Euro" prize game....
The alarm is the cause of the abrupt awakening of the second hero of the story. He is Dile's son Gruja (35), a jobless filmmaker for years that films weddings and funerals for a living, trying to save up enough money to finally propose to Bela (32) his girlfriend for years. As a side activity, he occasionally replaces an aged male stripper that undresses at hens' nights organized by girls from well-standing families. Bela is an unemployed opera singer. She earns her living with a specific home service - singing opera arias in homes of classical music lovers that are too old to go to the opera or to concerts... Her Mother (55) manages her "business" basically taking phone calls, and all the time hoping to meet some rich old man she can seduce into leaving her his apartment...
Along with these looser characters, there is Dile's "employee" - a boy called Insider (10). At the request of occasional customers (so far) he secretly photographs husbands and wives cheating on their partners, thus making an income for both Dile and himself...
But the main winner of the whole story? Who is he?
His name is Ammonia (35). He's spent about a thousand seconds in school but now earns a thousand Euro a day. A seasoned mobster. Actually, he's Gruja's elementary school buddy... Gruja runs into him accidentally after 25 years. He gets Gruja a gig - organizing and directing mobster festivities and their sendoff parties when they go to jail... At one of these parties he gets to meet a number of mobsters' children, aged 5-10. Adorned with heavy golden and diamond chains and jewelry, the kids gathered in a large living room imitate the striptease act that their parents are enjoying by the pool. It would be just kids playing if they didn't have a stripper to play with too. A real live one. Children behave as adults generating a comic and cruel effect at the same time.
As he spies on the party, Dile comes up with the idea to organize a "game" in which he, Gruja, Bela and Insider are supposed to rob the gold and diamonds worn by those kids...
The fate of the hero of the story depends on the successful realization of such a game... It turns out that all the kids are "a chip of the old block" and more astute players than the intellectuals-losers. Life - the eternal comedian - brings yet another couple of losers into the story in its final part. A couple of eighty-year-old  pensioners - Granny and Gramps. Their only hope to escape misery is to rob some bank... Choosing among the poorly protected branch offices in the outskirts of the city, they select the one that no longer exists, even though its sign still hangs on the hangar... With a strange twist of fate, that's exactly where Gruja, Bela and Insider have come after their failed robbery. Also there are Dile and Savka (out of the psychiatric hospital for the weekend) that managed to find the one bottle cap with the sign "million"... The story keeps winding and oscillating between a social drama with a happy end, and a full-blooded comedy with elements of a social drama, which in turn generates even greater comedy.

Thus, the "Beggar's opera" of our times culminates in the only possible hilarious and grotesque ending illuminated by the colorful fireworks from a yacht on which Ammonia has staged a beautiful, solemn sendoff party to jail - this time for himself... Throughout the story, disgruntled workers, march on with pickets in their hands, carrying sins that show their desperation and discontent. No one notices them nor takes them seriously any more. At the very end of the story, when - finally happy - Gruja and Bela kiss in the rain, at her Mother's wedding, Bela tells Gruja the good news - that she's pregnant. Bela's mother, has found herself a victim and married well. A group of dissatisfied workers pass by carrying signs, whilst old-man Dile singa a rap song about "revoilution". One of the signs closes the scene and the film.

IN THIS LIFE WE WERE HAPPY, IN SOME OTHER WE WILL BE RICH