Who's That Singing Over There?

Ko to tamo peva; comedy / road movie, Serbia, 1980; D: Slobodan Šijan, S: Pavle Vuisić, Dragan Nikolić, Danilo 'Bata' Stojković, Aleksandar Berček, Neda Arnerić, Taško Načić, Slavko Štimac, Bora Todorović

Serbia, '41. Two gypsies are singing how they would want the "whole world is just a dream", and then they go off to the local bus station in the middle of a countryside. A couple of other passengers, among them a hunter, a singer, a distinguished gentleman Brka, a sick man and a war veteran, are also waiting there for the bus that's going to take them to Belgrade. The bus arrives and they start their journey. The conductor's name is Krstić, while his son Miško is the driver. On the next bus stop they take a freshly married couple with them. But their journey is full of troubles: they have to make a detour due to a military blockade, the bus gets a flat tire and an old bridge turns into an obstacle. Just as they were about to enter Belgrade, the passengers accuse the gypsies of stealing and the Nazi airplanes start bombarding and destroy the bus. Only the two gypsies survive.

It would have been much more fair if international film critics did not completely ignore the excellent comedy "Who's That Singing Over There?" from Serbia, the only great film the director Slobodan Šijan ever made. Who would have thought that the best film in the history of Serbian cinema of the 20th century would revolve around—a bus trip? But it does. This amusing satiric road trip about the misadventures of passengers traveling in a bus engages the viewers through its simple, completely authentic and spontaneous, fresh, sometimes raw charm with a regression of two kid gypsies who sing their song from time to time, looking directly into the camera. It's a completely simple film, subtracted of any kind of complicated visual style, norms or meta film gimmicks, seemingly like a normal comedy, but full of wise observations, social commentaries about the human mentality, a tragic ending and a humane touch, suitable for viewing for everyone.

The bus represents the Yugoslavia in small—it's a world for itself, showing how people from different areas interact, and ironically almost none of them has a job, which can be interpreted as a social critique. The story from Dušan Kovačević is full of hilarious jokes: a man rides by sitting at the very end of a donkey; the bus stops to pick up two live pigs for the conductor in the trunk; and in one scene the bus is forced to drive through a farm field. But the best job was done by the brilliant, underrated comedian Danilo Stojković, here playing the distinguished gentlemen with a moustache, Brka: in one scene he joins every passenger on a hill secretly observing the married couple making love in the forest, saying: "They should be ashamed of themselves!" Someone replies to him: "But they don't know that they are being watched!", upon which he adds: "Well...still!" In another sequence, Brka wants to prove that it is safe to drive the bus over a shabby looking old bridge, so he boasts by leaning on to it, to demonstrate how stable it is, yet the tree fence breaks, causing him to fall into the river, and everyone else to panic and run away from the bridge. Later, he emerges alive and well, spots a rabbit, wants to catch it in the forest, but then falls down when the hunter shoots. One of the passangers adds: "Now he's really done for!", but Brka stands up again, alive and well. Stojković's comic timing is something like this character: indestructible. A cheerfully-silly masterpiece that it wasn't intended to be, "Who's That Singing Over here" is one of the greatest films the world has never heard of.

Grade:++++