Antoine Skála critiques the film Le Père (Serbian: Oтац, romanized: Otac) by Srđan Golubović here and offers some aesthetic (political) conclusions that aim to reinforce through words the new fissure in the superstructure of the seventh art, in keeping with the turbulence of our times.
In Front of a Crowd of Japanese Students in 1966, Jean-Paul Sartre Declared: In the current era, the intellectual can only envision and describe the world by adopting the point of view of the dominated through the alignment of his work with the ongoing struggles worldwide (1). From Parasites to Jawan, including Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Sabotage, the recent eruption in cinemas of narratives centered on the experience of dominated characters who persist in their aspirations and concrete struggles reflects the unprecedented emergence of a new fissure in the superstructure of the seventh art, in line with the ferment of our times. Praised by critics upon its release in 2020, awarded at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival as well as the 35th Golden Rooster Awards in Xiamen, the Serbian film Le Père (Serbian: Отац, romanized: Otac) by Srđan Golubović was rebroadcast on the Arte channel and website from February to March 2024, allowing the Western European intelligentsia to discover this film as exceptional as it is subversive, from which some aesthetic (political) conclusions should be drawn to support in words the effort of clarification most directly engaged by a certain trend of international cinema.
Real Conditions vs. Individualization
In front of the gates and undulations of the roof of a massive factory, a woman leads her children by the arm in a silent but breathless tracking shot. Moments later, the woman is stopped at the entrance of the company that refuses to pay the wages it owes her husband. The woman threatens to immolate herself with the children she can no longer feed. Emergency services intervene. The mother is interned in a psychiatric hospital. Social services take the children and place them in foster care. The decision is justified to the father due to the psychiatric condition of his wife and the (supposed) lack of parental investment in their children’s education. The father cites the most difficult material living conditions: he still hasn’t been paid. Consequently, it’s hard to access electricity, hot water, or even a computer as required. But the decision is made and he cannot contest it. He will later learn (only around 25 minutes into the film, as if to signify the importance of the state’s deviation without refraining from politically accusing the normal function of the contemporary state) about a network of internal corruption within social services: the local manager receiving bribes in exchange for interested placements of children. The father plans to retaliate, and armed with a blanket, a bottle of water, a loaf of bread, and a piece of bacon in his backpack, he begins a five-day journey to Belgrade to personally submit a complaint to the minister.
In one of the most remarkable phases of exposition, Le Père sees its sequences, dialogues, and silences articulated to serve the dissemination of a single radical watchword: everything is political. In Le Père, Srđan Golubović’s feat is to represent existence solely from the experience and perspective of those who are directly hit by class struggle, who daily feel the degrading omnipresence of politics: “One who belongs to the working class is aware that politics is a matter of life and death,” says Édouard Louis. In depicting a dialogue of the deaf between proletariat and bureaucracy, Le Père condemns the rhetoric of individualizing the causes of material living conditions generated by a class politics rendered unnameable to smooth social relations in the vein of “There is no such thing as society” and other nonsense about the impossibility of any alternative to globalized capitalism. Le Père engages in representing the politics of pacification (democratic) with social dialogue, bonuses, and individualized schedules, and well, never mind if a proletarian’s children are unjustly taken away in his lost province because, deep down, it’s his own doing… Srđan Golubović presents Le Père in these terms to the Canadian Mystic & Severe Radio (2): “The film is much more focused on Serbian society and the problems of Serbian society, but I think the problems of ordinary men in the world are similar. Not everywhere the same, but similar. I think in today’s world, neoliberal capitalism makes it so that if you lose your job, you lose your dignity and then you lose absolutely everything, and even if in Serbia it’s harder than in other countries, I think that subjects and stories about ordinary men are very important. It’s like Parasite but also Joker, this kind of stories, and I think that’s the problem of the present times. I have always tried in all my films to do something very based on life in my country and society to do something universal that everyone can understand.”
Recognized as the European master of antinarrative films in a completely different register, Michelangelo Antonioni, confined to his vague role of “filmmaker of incommunicability,” never managed as brilliantly as Le Père by Srđan Golubović to use silences and distances between his characters to embody on screen the concreteness of the forces governing their existences. The journey undertaken by the protagonist is profoundly political, quasi-sociological, through the encounter of individuals, landscapes, and non-humans met along his way, always pushing the viewer to situate a singular trajectory in the condition of a class and the politics of a country (a continent?). Because where many films intending to show or evoke the reality of social relations easily fall into the pitfall of representing otherness addressing the protagonist for narrative repercussions (deep down, everything revolves around a determining narrative thread along which the protagonist only passes with his auxiliaries), Le Père distinctly stands out in that it is precisely the protagonist who, without initially wanting to, resorts to observation to understand, expand his field of perception, becoming thus a witness for us to witness the reality of a condition. In fact, plot and narrative arcs are not here determining but determined to consider through a process of deindividualization the concrete situation of contemporary Serbia.
We, Serbian Proletarians
At the end of his exhausting journey, the protagonist understands that all the neighbors who looted his house in his absence would have preferred to see him dead rather than return. Never are the father, his children, or the proletarians around him portrayed by the film as mere victims. Concretely, their individualities are only the product of their (current, future, or threatened) condition as interchangeable parts in a certain mode of production. An oppressed condition from which these individualities can only evolve in one direction or another, according to an arrangement of circumstances that far surpasses them. The clarity of this stance justifies a most disconcerting and non-conventional ending, marked by a question mark at the crossroads of possibilities revealing the deep aesthetic and thus political rejection by Le Père of the dominant tendency to idealize “the poor in poverty.” This in the sense that, from a contestatory & consensual position within an industry, one pretends all the more to defend the interest of a class in itself by investing it with moral values while merely reproducing the bourgeois victimization of the subaltern classes in their denial as a political subjectivity (to remain wisely a class in itself) through the clearest mystification that anything virtuous could genuinely come from a condition characterized by capitalist oppression. This vision, sharply criticized by Slavoj Žižek (3) and inherited from a Christian, liberal, or even socialist realist tradition, prevents the political understanding of the concreteness of the violence experienced by the dominated classes and that the trappings of morality, in which the dominant ideology is draped and still making up many of our political assumptions, have truly little to do with the reality of the condition of people forced to act in the necessity of eating, drinking, housing, clothing. Because Le Père does not approach reality through the prism of freedom, humanity, or even less to recall “Use your vote. You have the power to change your future in Europe” but remains definitively faithful to its radical watchword, from its first seconds to its entirety, to represent reality only to reveal the concreteness of the acting forces beyond sensitivity and on which the protagonist is led to act by himself, from a singular discourse with necessarily plural implications, resonating with the right words saying that one stops being poor as soon as one starts to organize (4).
I, Daniel Blake (2016) is already a radical film (not so much) but is here far surpassed by Le Père in the strict persistence of the protagonist as a political subject, throughout the film, carrying his condition and primary claim as a standard in a first-person discourse subtly combining singular and plural, general and particular, against all odds. Although the stories chosen by Ken Loach and Srđan Golubović in their respective films are drawn from two very real stories with indisputable legitimacy, it must nevertheless be acknowledged that the representation of the story in Le Père appears otherwise more politically relevant. The sobriety of the film’s title, which could very well have been called We, Serbian Proletarians, is a minimal signifier of the content it names to better make itself accessible to a large audience always in a melodramatic topos without indulging in the strict aesthetic individualization in the consensual manner of a certain British director. Questioned about the undeniable similarities linking I, Daniel Blake and Le Père, Srđan Golubović admits to Directors Notes (5): “I like Ken Loach a lot, but I am much more influenced by Bresson, with the simplicity and dryness of his style. I don’t want to make him [the protagonist] a hero, but an ordinary man. For me, less is always more.” His style often described as naturalistic, Ken Loach is rarely capable of achieving in the present other than by exemplifying mistreated singularities with the hyperrealism of their own contradictions, yet still remarkable in the method and rigor of his resolutely less “natural” or “direct” formal research than the contrasting work of Srđan Golubović. This very subjectification of the social being could even become more complicated in upcoming projects by the British director (if it were not already sufficiently) considering the current trend of American and British studios to integrate artificial intelligence tools into the writing and production process of their films (6) and thus representing a tendency of dominant production to imagine in the short term nothing less than the use of digital processes to reduce the cost of presenting reality, even if it means artificializing all its parts, transforming a social being into an object of the imagination as if he were a hero in the saga of some superhero…
In portraying the impossibility of a miracle solution, Le Père proposes no outcome, no projection to frame the future, but still leaves open a glimpse of an organization and collective response, an entrance on the horizon of a political subjectivization of the dominated class with necessarily uncertain contours, as if to indicate in essence the power of the moment and the ability of the subalterns to seize their destiny.
This posture of principled clarity defended by Le Père stems from a tradition of Marxist and radical aestheticism most closely inspired by Robert Bresson (7), a precious model whose Diary of a Country Priest (1951) alone should still constitute a salutary breath of fresh air for a certain current of international cinema, sometimes neglecting in its radicalism to separate from formal experiments inspired by or at least linked to so-called Western subjectivism and its moral presuppositions rather than to strive towards the necessary radicalization of formal processes specifically oriented towards the working class.
Political Conclusion and Radical Art
Throughout the film, the protagonist’s actions continually reflect the ideological core of Le Père—a profound critique of the contemporary state’s failure and a subtle yet powerful illustration of the systemic challenges faced by the working class. By framing the protagonist not as a hero but as an ordinary man navigating extraordinary circumstances, Golubović’s film exposes the underlying forces that shape social and economic conditions.
As Le Père progresses, it becomes evident that the protagonist’s journey is not merely a personal quest but a microcosm of broader socio-political struggles. His encounters with various individuals and the landscapes he traverses serve to underscore the interconnectedness of individual suffering and collective class struggle. The film’s deliberate avoidance of a conventional resolution highlights the open-ended nature of the protagonist’s plight, symbolizing the ongoing, unresolved tensions within the system.
Golubović’s approach challenges the audience to reconsider traditional narratives of victimhood and heroism, pushing instead for a deindividualized portrayal that situates personal experiences within the broader context of class dynamics and political realities. This stance is both a critique of and a departure from the more individualized and often moralistic portrayals found in other contemporary cinema.
In conclusion, Le Père stands as a testament to the power of radical art to interrogate and illuminate the conditions of the dominated. By eschewing conventional narrative arcs and moralistic framing, Golubović succeeds in creating a film that is both a poignant reflection of individual struggle and a compelling call to recognize and address the systemic forces at play. This film not only contributes to the ongoing discourse on class and politics in cinema but also sets a precedent for future works to engage more deeply with the realities of the dominated classes.
Antoine Skála
References
(1) Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, Volume IV: What Is Literature?, translated by Bernard Frechtman, Gallimard, 1948. (2) Interview with Srđan Golubović for Canadian Mystic & Severe Radio, February 2020. (3) Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, Verso, 2008. (4) Declaration of the World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2001. (5) Interview with Srđan Golubović for Directors Notes, March 2020. (6) Report by the British Film Institute, December 2023. (7) Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, translated by Jonathan Griffin, Green Integer, 1997.
Antoine Skála serait né le 14 juin 2016. Du coin de P'tit Quinquin aux manifs parisiennes, ses interventions méditent l'usage du feu pour dégager les possibles par-delà l'impasse du présent.