Three review – Yugoslavian trilogy of tales tracks the horrors of the second world war

Aleksandar Petrović’s 1965 interlinked stories focus on the changes wrought in one young Yugoslavian by the brutality of the war and its aftermath

Serbian film-maker Aleksandar Petrović was a member of the former Yugoslavia’s insurgent Black Wave cinema movement; it also included Dušan Makavejev’s WR: The Mysteries of the Organism. Now Petrović’s fascinating and mysterious anti-war triptych Three, from 1965, has been revived, performed and presented in a distinctively self-aware, almost theatrical way. It’s a succession of three interlinked tales from the horror of the second world war, based on stories by Serbian author Antonije Isaković.

Milos, played by Serbian actor Velimir “Bata” Zivojinovic, is a student who is to become an anti-German partisan after the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia and then, at the war’s end, a cold, calculating communist state-security officer. In the first story, we see a crowd of terrified civilians in 1941, waiting for the Nazis’ imminent invasion. A platoon of soldiers nervously strut around, unsure what to do, and some more wait on a stationary train, awaiting orders to move out and laughing blearily at a group of Gypsies who are playing music and cruelly displaying a dancing bear. A line of recruits, still in their civilian clothes, wait for instructions. At this stage, Milos is a student among the crowd, and he witnesses a journalist with a camera being instantly shot on the orders of a jumpy soldier, because he appears to be a spy; the one person who could have spoken up for him, his wife, arrives on the scene with their child, too late. “Because of the likes of you we lost Kosovo in 1389!” shouts someone in the crowd, a folk memory of national resentment which was to be revived during the 1990s Balkan wars.