User Reviews

Disturbing exploration of false cohesion in Yugoslav communism. Apparently, Comrade Bata Radulaski always missed the human enigma of free will in the equation he raised for communism in his enormous preserve of power in Vojvodinian; No one prepared Lenin to be called a spy and a suspect when he was arrested at his summer home in Poronin in 1914, so who would have predicted that Bata would receive a beating from the same party colleagues and indestructible communist creed with whom he lived? Diary on collective farms? An ideology as such by demanding the depersonalization of each member, school teachers haranguing boys to cooperate with a sack of oats or harvest even though they are in extreme poverty, Bogdan being a scoundrel around here and Crvenjak tying up his wife Julka, but Bata himself is mean and every time he, accompanied by Comrade Olga, confiscates his companions' crops, he reprimands them with the same story of having gone to war and fought for everyone, and they must sacrifice themselves even if they go hungry. Olga, who falls in love with Bata and is reciprocated, does not regret not having a private life or family or children, she even states "You see, If I'd come again to this world, I'd dream the same dream again" is that dream? To remain a communist and fight for the party, could we expect more fanaticism? Sreten Crvenjak questions God: "this prayer goes to your forgetful brain, don't you see, damn it, that I live neither for the first nor the last but for the only occasion?", while Brother Pantelija seems to obey the directives of the partisans and At night he steals from the community and if that were not enough, Mikula is beaten by his son because the son is a communist and does not accept listening to his father stigmatize him. And just when Bata and Olga, expecting his child, decide to try again to take the communist reins, a mine closes the episode of their - in itself - sad future.