Mark Reviews Movies: THE LOAD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 5, 2019

We remember the battles. We remember (although often simplify) the politics. We remember the heroes and the villains, on both the national and the personal levels. We remember a lot about war, but The Load serves as a stark reminder that, especially in this time of modern warfare with its impersonal tactics of bombing places beyond recognition, there are still people trying to live their lives as conflict rages around them.

This is a film, written and directed by Ognjen Glavonić (making his narrative feature debut), that is entirely about the personal ramifications of war. The story, a road trip from Kosovo to Belgrade as NATO forces bomb Serbia in 1999, takes place away from the bombings. The effects, though, are always seen and/or heard.

The dawn and night skies are still peppered with anti-aircraft fire in the distance. Smoke rises in the distance, and cars, still ablaze, block certain roadways. People gather near a river, displaced or awaiting a raft transporting people to safety, and go off to look for somewhere to stay or to tell some terrible news. Leaflets dropped from NATO planes fall or blow in the wind, and the message, written in the local language, promises that the fighting will continue, because the allied forces have weeks, months, or even years left of fight in them.

Those are just some of the sights that Vlada (Leon Lučev) encounters or just misses on his long, detoured trip across the countryside toward a military base just outside the Serbian capital. He's driving a truck. That's his job now, because the factory where he worked closed and he still has a family for whom to provide. This will be his third gig doing the work. He knows the drill now. A van, filled with other dayworkers like himself, brings him to a remote location—the remnants of a factory this time. He finds the truck, gets in, and drives until he reaches his destination, where his pay will be waiting for him.

There's an important detail here: The back of the truck is inaccessible because of a chain and a padlock. Vlada has no idea of the cargo he's transporting, but that's also part of the deal. He doesn't ask, and they don't have to tell him that they won't tell him what's in the truck. With everything that he sees about the war unfolding around him, the mysterious cargo might be the key to the reason for the fighting and a sign of the true horror of this particular conflict.

Glavonić takes his time, because the film has no reason to rush to Vlada's destination. That's where the soldiers with automatic rifles are, and this story, although very much about war, isn't about the conflict itself. It has no need for battles or skirmishes or chases or explosions. This is a film about the consequences of war on an intimate level, in which people go on living, children go on playing, and a man simply drives a truck to earn money for his wife and teenage son. It seems so normal, until we realize that these people are trying to escape conflict, these kids have seen some awful things, and the man in the truck has sold his soul to the regime of a genocidal criminal without even realizing it.

That, of course, is the underlying context of this tale—what was actually happening during the Kosovo War. Pointedly, no one speaks of it in this film. That's not because of denial or anything of the sort. It's simply because Glavonić's story is populated with people who have no love for or even interest in the nationalist politics of Slobodan Milošević (Only his picture appears in the background of a single shot inside the military instillation). These are simply ordinary people, attempting to continue ordinary lives under extraordinary circumstances.

After being detoured by a pair of burning cars blocking the road to the city, Vlada encounters a young man named Paja (Pavle Čemerikić), who's trying to get to Germany via his adopted hometown of Belgrade. The driver refuses the kid's request for a ride, but miles down the side road, he notices that Paja has hitched a ride on the back of the truck. Vlada lets him get into the truck's cab.

Obviously, the film has Vlada arrive at his destination and witness what he has been transporting (The only hint is an occasional clanking sound from the back, and there's also the shattering discovery of what's causing it and what the object represents). Most of it, though, is dedicated to a tour of a war-ravaged country, filled with still-surviving people and shot by cinematographer Tatjana Krstevski as if most of the color has been drained from this land. The driver and his unexpected passenger stop at a wedding reception, which, although seemingly unthinkable under the circumstances, serves as an embodiment of how life must continue despite the circumstances.

At these various stops (the earlier-mentioned river, an auto shop to ask for directions, the party), Glavonić repeatedly shifts focus to a brief vignette of a stray stranger—a man giving bad news to someone, a kid who steals Vlada's lighter, a group of teens playing with fire outside the wedding reception. Nothing comes of these scenes in terms of plot, but their presence is a reminder that Vlada's is not the only story of importance here. There are countless others.

Two of them involve young people (three, if one counts Paja, who enters the tale as a mystery and departs it before we know his fate), and one of those, the kid who steals Vlada's lighter and hides at a war memorial, is key to Glavonić's other goal with this story. It's an honorable past—of men like Vlada's father, who fought the Nazis—forgotten. The war memorials are ignored or put on postcards, and the portraits of old military heroes are kept in a storage space to make room for Milošević's visage. This generation is growing up with leaders on the opposite end of the spectrum, potentially losing sight of right and wrong.

These are deep and, still to this day (perhaps especially now), vital observations and lessons, and Glavonić presents them with the admirable subtlety of the rest of his war story. The Load is patient, meticulous, and, in its third act, quietly devastating.

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