Belgrade Radio Taxi

It's a familiar picture: once again there is a traffic jam on the Belgrade Bridge. And all those waiting in the avalanche of cars deal with the situation differently. In one car, for example, the pharmacist Biljana (Branka Katic) is arguing with her fiancé, in another the teacher Anica (Anica Dobra) is pursuing her not really happy thoughts, and in a taxi the Bosnian refugee Gavrilo (Nebojsa Glogovac) is driving a distraught woman (Nada Sargin) and her baby through the rain. When the woman suddenly gets out and jumps off the bridge, the lives of these disparate people become fatefully intertwined.

Belgrade Radio Taxi is a look at Belgrade today, embedded in the final days of a radio station spreading good cheer. Serbian filmmaker Srdjan Koljevic solves the way in which the different stories are connected in a thoroughly convincing way. The fact that he shuttles back and forth between drama and comedy works very well in itself. At the same time, he cleverly avoids the film being too overwhelmed by dramatic heaviness. All the characters have experienced a lot of bad things in their past, whether it be war or the loss of a child. And yet Koljevic's production never gets too bogged down in frustration, instead building the protagonists' heavy pasts into the plot almost casually.

Although this is to the episodic film's credit, Belgrade Radio Taxi ends up being only partially convincing. There are some over-extended lengths and due to the various storylines, some characters just remain a bit too pale to really reach the viewer. Furthermore, despite some nice shots, it lacks that certain cinematic flair to justify buying a ticket. As a TV tip, it would certainly get a recommendable. But for a cinema visit, the whole thing is just too ordinary, too simple, to make going to the cinema worthwhile.

Sure, it's nice in principle that attempts are being made to bring even such small stories to a wider audience. But realistically, there is a relatively small target audience for a film like Belgrade Radio Taxi. This may be well served, as the coherent production and good actors provide enough plus points. But given how many much better and, above all, more cinema-worthy works - including those from the arthouse genre - are merely being dumped as DVD premieres, it's quite surprising that a film that would be much better off on television makes it to the big screen. And there, however many positive aspects the festival hit may have, Belgrade Radio Taxi is simply out of place

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp