Ryan McNeil
I came amazingly close to ditching out on my Monday night screening, but looking back I’m glad I went. TEARS FOR SALE won’t go down as the best TIFF movie I’ve ever seen, but it will certainly rank as one of the most memorable. To paraphrase late night’s Craig Ferguson, this is 12 hours of absurdity in an 86 minute film.
TEARS FOR SALE (aka Čarlston za Ognjenku) is a fairy tale for grown ups. It’s about a Serbian town where over the years all the men have died off, and the women find themselves…restless. At the centre of it is two sisters, Ognjenka and Boginja, who are professional mourners. After accidentally killing the villages last man standing, they are dispatched to find new men, or else they’ll be burned at the stake. As it happens, they manage to find two strapping brutes, and I’ll bet you can guess what happens when they bring them back to the village.
The movie is visually lavish, enough to make Guillermo del Toro’s head spin. There is an exploding vineyard, a human cannonball, a tango dual through broken glass, and more raging female hormones than a Michael Buble concert. A Toronto magazine described what unfolds as “batshit craziness”, which I can’t agree with. Indeed the story is so far out in left field that it has likely left the ballpark, but it hasn’t done so in a bad way.
All of the oddity and quirkiness that TEARS FOR SALE serves up is tender and well-intended, and if given the choice to see TEARS FOR SALE or this week’s box office champ BANGKOK DANGEROUS, I’d easily choose the former. It is the first feature by director Uroš Stojanovic, and while we’re on the subject of firsts, it was the first Serbian movie I’ve ever watched.
TEARS FOR SALE plays twice more at TIFF 08, and dos not yet have North American Release info . It’s in a class all of its own – go see it.