Charleston & Vendetta

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Charleston & Vendetta

Directed by	Uroš Stojanović
Produced by	Jelena Mirković Batrić Nenezić Marko Paljić Milena Tomić Mirjana Tomić
Written by	Uroš Stojanović Aleksandar Radivojević Batrić Nenezić Stevan Koprivica Srđan Dragojević
Starring	Katarina Radivojević Sonja Kolačarić Olivera Katarina Stefan Kapičić Nenad Jezdić Danijela Vranješ Danica Maksimović
Music by	Shigeru Umebayashi
Cinematography	Bojana Andrić Dragan Đorđević Nenad Vasić
Editing by	Eve Beloiak Đorđe Marković Dejan Urošević
Distributed by	Blue Pen
Release date(s)	30 January 2008
Running time	95 min.
Country	Serbia
Language	Serbian
Budget	€4 million
Gross revenue	unknown
Official website
IMDb profile

Charleston & Vendetta (Original title in Serbian: Чарлстон за Огњенку, Čarlston za Ognjenku, literary translated to Charleston for Ognjenka) is a Serbian film. Directed by Uroš Stojanović, it's starring Sonja Kolačarić, Katarina Radivojević, Nenad Jezdić, Stefan Kapičić and Olivera Katarina. It was released in Serbia following a January 30, 2008 premiere at Belgrade's Sava Centar. Made on a budget that exceeds €4 million^[1], the movie was shot during summer 2005 as the most expensive Serbian movie ever. It then went into a long post-production due to specific CGI requirements.

The film is the first Serbian spectacle, featuring 40 minutes worth of special effects^[2] and over 100,000 meters of film, around five times more than averagely used in Serbia. Its music was made by Japanese composer Shigeru Umebayashi. For is usage of special effects, it is greatly compared to the Lord of the Rings. It also featured the return of Olivera Katarina to the filming industry after a pause of three decades. Luc Besson will spread the move to foreign market. As of 2008 it is the most popular movie in Serbia.

1 Plot
2 Reception and Reaction
- 2.1 Critical
- 2.2 Boxoffice
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Plot

The movie's plot is set during 1920s in post-World War I Serbia. Rebuilding after a gruelling armed conflict in which it lost a sizable part of its young male population, the nation is struggling to recover demographically. The situation is especially visible in certain rural parts where this shortage of men threatens to extinguish life completely.

Two sisters, Ognjenka (Sonja Kolačarić) and Mala Boginja (Katarina Radivojević) from a fictional Pokrp village that has no males of marrying age set off for the city in search of good men to bring home.^[3]

[edit] Reception and Reaction

[edit] Critical

Despite a lot of hype, Charleston & Vendetta's initial reviews in the Serbian media are a mixed bag.

Web magazine Popboks calls it a cross between an A movie and a B movie. According to their reviewer Vladislava Vojnović, despite being clearly conceived as an A movie "with production whose plentitude is on full display - from glamorous make-up, costume design, and cinematography over to impeccable picture & sound quality and last but not least Sonja Kolačarić's fascinating portrayal - Charleston & Vendetta also contains many B movie liabilities like a subpar screenplay with plenty of holes".^[4]

In similar vein, Politika's film critic Dubravka Lakić praises the movie's look, but has problems with its screenplay oversights, all the while feeling this "postmodern cheerful fairytale for adults" is "more of a glamorously packaged oversized trailer than a story-based product with coherent beginning, middle and end".^[5]

The review penned by B92's Gavrilo Petrović is more of the same, extolling the film's "magical look that brings certain French blockbusters to mind" with "brilliant photography, grandiose sequences and costumes, opulent cinematography, mostly impeccable editing, and computer generated imagery that stands up to anything seen in other great-looking movies" while criticizing "the way dramaturgy takes a back seat to aggressive spectacle sometime into the film with two initially likeable heroines suddenly turning into detached fashion models while all that is required from the multitude of supporting actresses is to look good in slow-motion".^[6]

NIN magazine's Saša Janković was very critical, calling the film "an example of Serbian megalomania" and adding that "its screenplay is incomplete while the direction is at times fairly arbitrary".^[7]

On the other hand, the film got its most glowing review from Blic's Milan Vlajčić who called it "an extraordinary moment for new Serbian film". In between praises for the whole cast, Vlajčić especially notices director and writer Uroš Stojanović "whose debut showed maturity in stylistic composition of a comedy that contains patterns of quite a few genres - from melodrama to fantasy".^[8]

[edit] Boxoffice

Despite the lukewarm reviews, Serbian audiences have so far responded to the movie in large numbers. Shown on 20 screens during its first weekend in general release (February 1-3, 2008), Charleston & Vendetta raked in a gross amount of US$80,699.^[9] Its second weekend (February 8-10, also on twenty screens) in Serbian theaters was even more successful with US$92,377 earned.^[10]