It's hard to review this movie since it seems to require a knowledge of post-WW II Yugoslavia that I don't have. I certainly enjoyed it but was never able to escape the feeling that I was missing important points. The movie is set (I think--it's never made explicit) in the days right after WW II and is about a high school student who is a member of the communist party but is witness and participant of a number of incidents that make him question the motivation of his fellow party members. It is hard to believe that a movie that cynical about how the communists took over was able to be made in a communist country. (Although there are many close ups of pictures of Stalin so I got the impression that the director was laying a lot of the blame of the excesses of the period on him.) The story is told with a lot of humor and with short jerky scenes that often raise more questions than they answer. Bonus points for lots of great folk music, which would be reason enough to watch even if the rest of the movie wasn't so enjoyable.
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tony-70-66792021 June 2021Marshal Tito was a big film fan, and took a great interest in Yugoslavia's movie industry, which was state-run after WW2. He launched the Festival of Yugoslav Film at Pula in 1954: it became an international film festival, staged every summer in the magnificent Roman amphitheatre. The main theme of the country's films was the undeniably heroic struggle of Tito and his Communist partisans against the German invaders , a genre which culminated in Veljko Bulajic's star-studded epic "The Battle on the Neretva" (1969, the same year as this film.) However, in the Sixties a New Wave of directors emerged, as it did in France, Czechoslovakia and other countries. These directors, Zivojin Pavlovic among them, were more critical of their society.
Milena Dravic, the country's biggest female star, is top-billed in "The Ambush." She plays the daughter of a lawyer, who we see losing everything for the crime of being middle-class, but she's not the main character. That's Ive, a young Communist played by Ivica Vidovic: both he and Dravic play school kids, but are a good 10 years too old for their parts. Ive is encouraged by a local Communist agitator called Topolovacki, but the latter is killed in an ambush by Chetniks led by a man called Marko. The local partisan leader, Jotic, recruits Ive and a drunken womanizer called Zeka to go with him in pursuit of the Chetniks (surely he could have mustered a more impressive team.)
I'm amazed this film, which is excellent, ever got released. The young Communists who ransack the lawyer's home (Ive doesn't join them) are shown as despicable, and so is Jotic. He sends Zeka ahead to flush the Chetniks out of a farm house, which he does with a grenade, getting badly wounded in the process. When they finally locate Marko Jotic sends Ive ahead to deal with him. When Ive finds Marko dead, Jotic shoots the dead man, then sits and receives the praise of the drunken village elder for the grenade attack (he's left Zeka to die of his wounds) and for killing Marko. The disillusion with, even contempt for, the revolution is amazing. No surprise that in the same year this film was released the New Wave was dubbed the Black Wave, and some of the directors, particularly Dusan Makavejev, had their careers interrupted (the same thing happened to some Czech New Wavers after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring.) Strangely, though this is probably the most subversive film of the Black Wave, this didn't happen to Pavlovic. "The Ambush" is the first film of his I've seen, and makes me want to see his others.