‘Working Class Heroes’: Berlin Review

Dir: Milos Pusic. Serbia. 2022. 85 mins.

Serbian director Milos Pusic’s third feature could have been set anywhere in the world where a combination of greed and unchecked power generates a toxic atmosphere of contempt for workers’ rights. But it makes great use of its actual main location – a half finished concrete hulk of a building that functions like the grim set for some modern staging of a Greek tragedy. Featuring another incendiary performance by Jasna Djuricic, whose role in Jasmila Zbanic’s Quo Vadis Aida? garnered her an EFA Best Actress award, it’s a strange, loose-limbed film that veers across genres and tonal registers before suddenly rooting its audience to their seats in a tense finale. After its Berlinale premiere, the film’s fate will largely depend on how distributors and audiences respond to its nonchalant approach to story, though its very carelessness could be a plus with those who find dramatic perfection dull.

It’s a strange, loose-limbed film

At first, it seems like Dardenne brothers or Ken Loach territory as we follow Djuricic’s character Lidija, the assistant, enforcer and mistress of unscrupulous property developer Miki (Aleksandar Djurica). Early on she’s seen helping to evict a desperate family from their apartment before blithely jumping a long queue in a town planning office where she slips a functionary a banknote along with a project that needs approving. She’s also responsible for handling workers like the team about to start clearing the ground for a new construction site, the reconversion of an abandoned development that may well date back to Serbia’s pre-independence period (with its menacing Iron Curtain brutalism, it certainly looks the part). ‘Handling’ means persuading cowardly foreman Braco (Predrag Momcilovic) to pay his motley crew with promises rather than money, and covering up any work accidents that occur through any means possible. When, late on, she describes herself to two policemen as the company PR, the irony is not lost.

Lidija feels a bit like the recruitment agent played by Kierston Wareing in Ken Loach’s It’s A Free World… at the end of the film, after she’s sold her soul to the devil. It’s clear that there’s a big part of this conflicted woman that hates her job, and unlike her bastard of a boss, she still shows occasional glimmers of humanity (though a short scene that shows her drab, difficult home life comes across as gratuitous). But just as it starts to invest in Lidija and sets up what feels like a suspenseful moral drama about how far a woman can be pushed, Working Class Heroes gets bored of that line and begins to hang out with the construction site work crew.

Suddenly, it’s back to a laid-back proletarian comedy-drama that seems part improvised. The site is cleared, a lot of beer is drunk, some dentures are washed, and an orthodox bishop who looks like a down-on-his-luck heavy metal singer turns up to bless the project. As this means it will be on the local TV news, the workers get to dress up in hard hats and work overalls, just this once. An older worker that everyone calls Professor (Boris Isakovic) emerges as the crew’s unofficial union leader, and there’s a rather sweet romance involving Mali (Stefan Beronja), the youngest member of the work crew, and a local prostitute. Finally, around an hour in, the two plot strands combine, and the drama and suspense return.

It slowly becomes apparent that if Pusic’s quirky film had to put in a single box, it would have to be labelled a very dark and bitter satire. This comes through strongly in some bizarre contrapuntal musical choices – like the jaunty piano melody that accompanies that early eviction scene – but it’s most evident in Working Class Heroes’ wishful-thinking ending. The film’s title is of course a reference to another dark and bitter satire, John Lennon’s 1971 song ’Working Class Hero’, whose lines “There’s room at the top they are telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill” might serve as this strange and strangely likeable drama’s tagline.