There's no shortage of engaging humans in the Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian coproduction All for Free (Sve Dzaba), but gravity is really the unspoken star here. We feel it from the moment we're introduced to the movie's disheveled hero, Goran (Rakan Rushaidat), stumbling out of a faceless provincial tavern in the middle of the night and illustrating that "falling down drunk" is more than just a figurative expression.
Goran's muted but lucid inner monologue belies his incapacitated state, his weirdly cogent voice-over comparing himself with certain Asians and American Indians whose blood supposedly lacks the ability to absorb alcohol. "It goes to their legs," explains Goran as he collapses in a heap, limbs and life pulled down not so much by booze but by the gravity of existence itself, just like everyone else in this sad, little Bosnian sinkhole.
The Balkan no-man's-land of All for Free is a place more susceptible than most to free-fall, where what goes up must come down — and down and down. Years of war, endless ethnic and religious conflict, corruption and wildly dysfunctional leadership have left the economy devastated and the population exhausted and aimless. Goran is an emotional wreck (as is pretty much everybody else here), a melancholy layabout who shuffles around a house with ceilings so low that he seems to have developed a permanent stoop (a characteristic also shared by almost everyone else in the movie). Poor Goran's barely 30, but he's already lost most of his friends and family to various acts of senseless and stupid violence, and his principal activities now consist of sitting around watching television all day, chain smoking and getting smashed every evening with his two surviving pals.
One of these pals, an amiable hulk who's lost both arms while clearing mines from his yard, is also Goran's roommate, and the two men seem to have developed a classic symbiotic relationship. Goran spoon-feeds scrambled eggs to his armless buddy and holds his dick when he pees, while his large, limbless companion can be counted on to haul his roommate home after yet another long night of alcohol abuse (as long as Goran remembers to hook his arms around his friend's trunk-like legs before losing consciousness). It's an image the movie returns to more than once, this grotesque but whimsical vision of a corpse-like drunk being dragged down the street by his armless comrade, and it neatly sums up the darkly humorous humanism that keeps All for Free from becoming simply a depressing experience.
Sarajevan first-time director Antonio Nuic manages to maintain this tricky balance, keeping one foot in the light and one in the abyss (or "the shit," as more than one character succinctly puts it), and even at its funniest, the movie's humor always makes us squirm a little because of the constant underpinning of tension. We know what this world is capable of, and that tension comes bubbling up to the surface soon enough, when an uncomfortable encounter with a tavern owner and his pregnant wife culminates in our hero's last remaining friends lying dead on a barroom floor.
More mopey and alone than ever, Goran sells his house, hops a train without knowing where it's going and winds up standing in front of a broken-down bar-on-wheels, which he impulsively buys, outfits with a buzzing neon sign advertising "All For Free" and drives from town to town giving away booze to the locals.
The bulk of All for Free unfolds as a sort of slow-mo road movie along the meticulously deadpan lines of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise or Wim Wenders' Kings of the Road, with Goran traveling all over the place but never really getting anywhere. He simply shows up somewhere in his mobile tavern and wins over the initially suspicious natives by getting them plastered on free booze, the copious drinking and shabby excess looking a lot like a barely satisfying plug for the big, fat existential holes in everyone's lives. And then he leaves, never staying in one place more than a day. "One sees everything in a day," he philosophizes. "Even more than is necessary."
Goran eventually breaks his own cardinal rule and pays the price, overstaying his welcome when he loses his head to a pretty redhead in thrall to a local thug. The redhead's weary half-smile at Goran's confessed longing for something "normal" is all the confirmation we need that the word means less than zero, and soon enough our hero's stumbling down the road just like he did in the first scene, falling on his face again, a victim of local brandy and gravity.
Nuic doesn't quite know how to bring it all home, but the movie still manages to rank with The Bet Collector and The Custodian as one of the best films so far in this year's Global Lens series, and that's saying something. At its unpretentious, tragicomic best, All for Free conjures up the nihilistic slapstick of the Golden Age of Eastern European cinema, those dark, droll and endlessly imaginative films that emerged around the time of France's New Wave, mixing high anxiety and low comedy. Those movies were ripe with angst and irony, and so is All for Free, beginning with a double-edged title reminding us that there's more than one F-word. And the more dangerous of them is still just another word for nothing left to lose.
This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2008.