A miserable, cynical and histrionic dirge into the lives of contemporary highschoolers who, according to Serbian director Miroslav Terzićand screenwriter Bojan Vuletić, want nothing more than to murder one another and dance to shitty techno-pop. From a brazenly portentous opening shot of a burning apartment block, to its fantastically dumb fire-based finale, 3 Weeks After plays like an improvised right-wing polemic on the sorry state of modern youth that never for a moment feels like it exists in an authentic version of reality. And as a metaphor for the violence in Serbian society at large, it feels like a song we’ve danced to many, many times before.
When the perma-glum Tsotsa (Jovan Ginić) arrives for a school coach trip to Bulgaria, the two supervising teachers seem cheerfully surprised that he’d be up for such a jaunt. Something terrible happened recently, and everyone is shocked that such an extracurricular activity would be allowed to go ahead. The more information we receive about the terrible event, the more we agree that whoever gave this trip the green light should be sent directly to a psychiatric ward – a venue, coincidentally, that Tsosta has spent a bit of time in recently.
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Aside from the sympathetic Daria, all the other kids are out-and-proud in their hatred of Tsotsa, and are totally comfortable in linking his actions to the recent horrific event. One of the mean girls sitting on the back of the bus engineers a rest stop so her skinhead boyfriend can sneak on, who also happens to be one of the bully ringleaders that led to the tragedy. For dramatic ease, we have two teachers who are completely useless, have not heard of the concept of safeguarding and just kinda let the kids go full ‘Lord of the Flies’ on one another.
With its stylised inserts, blippy electronic soundtrack and endless tracking shots of people walking through grim landscapes, the film certainly has aspirations towards a type of angular, feel-bad arthouse event that has littered the cinema landscape for the last 20 years. What’s so callous about the film is that it constantly teases you with the promise of a violent release, slowly building a context to allow the bullies to go full-tilt nasty on the shell-shocked Tsotsa. There are echoes of Brian De Palma’s Carrie in its inexorable drift towards transgression, but with none of the wit, empathy and originality of that film.
Films about bullying are, in general, akin to shooting dramatic fish in a barrel, as you have the aggressor, who harbours irrational hatred and needs no additional colour, and you have the victim who has to make you a little bit sad when he/she becomes a human punching bag. This film falls into that trap entirely, happy to allow the single-serving characters to do their thing with little recourse to generating a more nuanced reading of this common form of human discord. But as bad as the kids are here, the ineffectual teachers are worse, locking themselves away with their ear plugs and self-help CDs while the kids beat ten bells out of one another. It’s a film which, at every turn, takes the easiest and quickest route towards articulating its trashy thesis.