As much as I’d like to give Luc Besson—director of Léon, among others, and the force behind getting Tears for Sale, Uros Stojanovic masterful debut, released in North America—props for good intentions, I really just can’t. To want this newly edited version, seen last night for the first time outside of Serbia, made shorter, as it was after Luc Besson edited about 15 minutes out of it over two years ago, seems, though I am not calling it perfect, just plain narrow-minded. Tears for Sale, with its Jean-Pierre Genet fantasy and its Peckinpah heart, it's, I may regret this tomorrow, Fellini-esque grandiosity, makes every moment a giving one and I, personally, would feel jipped if the first version I saw of it was Besson’s significantly shorter cut.
To watch such a version would be to lose some of it and this film is almost entirely, from beginning to end, transcendent. It manages to superpose the Serbian folkloric tradition onto the backdrop of the years following WWI, a fabled world running short on men, resulting in a resiliently original take on the world of men and the wars they are constantly fighting to the death—i.e. where death has become so frequent, crying for the dead has become a full-time trade, one which can, and does, fill lakes with tears. As part of such, the film presents a village completely devoid of men; where the men have all died and/or failed to come back from war. Women, grown-up and left with no significant others to love, crave men like prisoners might women.
And Bojinga and Ognjenka, descendants of a long line of local “wailers”, are made to go get one, after Ognjenka accidentally causes the heart attack that kills the last, fragile, stinky old man. Inevitably, the two beautiful girls end up bringing a couple of men back to the village. They also end up falling in love with them on the way and, what is most interesting here, they, like men, end up fighting over them, along with the other women from the village, like men have over land; they are given a glimpse of what caving in on themselves, just as the world of men, might be like.
And though, as I’m sure Besson noted, parts of the film are sentimental and imperfect, it is hard to think of them as unessential, or to imagine the choice of imperfect sentimentality as wholly inappropriate. When Arsa, the Charleston-singing object of Bojinga’s affection, runs from the women of the village—bitterly realizing he is desired not for himself, but simply for what he is (save for his Bojinga, who truly loves him)—into, unwittingly, the minefield left behind by, ironically, the last of the village’s men, he could have just as easily been simply chased by Bojinga and, once she grabs his hand, blown up. But in a film where our leading women are brand new to love, and all too weary of its absence, this is not, whether I or Besson like it, enough; to experience one last time is, simultaneously, to love for all-time, as a pure young thing might. It is the choice to die in a world equalized, half hers, half his, instead of going on without the force of love in one’s life.
In a world where people are willing to die for something as boring and cheap, in comparison, as land, dying to keep love alive in one’s self seems rather OK. Tears for Sale is, I’ll agree, a bit long; but I can forgive it for being long, just as I forgave the length of 8 ½, which made me want to marry every Italian woman, just as this bit of 35mm love makes me want a harem of country Serbians. What I cannot forgive, incidentally, is Luc Besson for having written From Paris, with Love. Or for having cut the 100 minutes I saw to a mere 86. Some people just ruin things. Uros Stojanovic is not among them.
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