Tito and Me

Reel Whirled Peas

In his review of the film Tito and Me, Vincent Canby writes:

"Tito and Me" was made before the Yugoslav war broke out, which doesn't help one's passive enjoyment of the film today. Tito's excesses, his rule by repression, his cult of personality, all of these things could be more easily satirized while the federation he helped forge still held together. The satire now looks shortsighted, over-simplified, almost ghoulish.

His observation is unique among the reviews I read, and I believe it merits some discussion. Filmmakers once censored by repressive governments got a new lease on their creative lives during the 1990s, and many, like this film’s Goran Markovic, took the opportunity to poke fun at the regimes as a way of revisioning official history.

In the film, the adults seem world-weary, only 10 years removed from a World War that changed the rules in the Eastern Europe. In our Unit Two readings, we find that Yugoslavia was an amalgam of ethnics, religions and cultural traditions. Croats supported Hitler in the War, and their secret police committed atrocities against Serbs, Muslims, and Jews. Serbians made up the majority of the communist resistance, although even within the nationalists there was conflict between Mihailovich’s Serbian Nationalists and Tito’s Communists. A virtual civil war was paralleling the world one, resulting in Tito rising to supreme power and freeing the Balkans from Hitler, without the aid of the Russians. Yugoslavia was thus geographically united under Tito, but lingering animosities and a bankrupt economy made the created a nation that was far from single-mindedness.

So we see Zoran’s parents, artistic and bourgeois, trying to make sense of their odd child’s love for the man responsible for their repression. In the film we do not see the specific reasons for their unhappiness with the regime, but the visible discomfort expressed on his father’s face each time Zoran speaks or writes about his love of Tito tells the story. The “March Around Tito’s Homeland”, a weeklong hiking and camping retreat for the winners of the “Why I like the President”, essay contest, serves as an allegory of Tito’s rule of Yugoslavia. The March is undertaken by about 20 youths and their adult leader, Comrade Raja.

Raja serves as Tito’s proxy. He shows great favoritism to his elect, and great disdain toward the ill begotten. He constantly spies on the children, looking through peepholes, taking notes of their actions and comments, enlisting the children to tell on one another, forbidding them to speak, and threatening them in order to control them. He is constantly licking his finger to check wind direction before setting out in the wrong direction. He is Tito as a comic book character, one that allows even a 10 year-old completely immersed in the cult of personality to “recognize the idiocies and dangers of one-man rule” (Canby). A key moment of the film follows Raja’s decision to send Zoran home early, and at the train station gives the boy a sandwich and a train ticket. Despite his obsessive love of food, Zoran throws the sandwich into the trash. Raja demands that Zoran retrieve the sandwich, and he refuses. A long moment of willfulness exists between them, and Raja breaks first. The other children move to stand with Zoran against Raja. The people have overthrown tyranny.

Canby might say that if you carried the allegory to its historic end we might see the children, after a brief period of self-congratulations for setting themselves free, begin fighting one another to replace Raja as leader, and, gaining no clear consensus, eventually splitting into 4 or 5 smaller groups and engaging in internecine conflicts. One can make the claim that Yugoslavia should never have been a single geopolitical entity to begin with. “But, compared to the present horrors”, Canby writes, the “Tito era takes on a golden aura”. There were periods of economic prosperity. There was relative peace among the ethnic groups. The country received monetary support from both sides of the Cold War. Recently, there has been civil war, high unemployment, and charges of ethnic cleansing.
Perhaps Markovic’s smug ridicule of the regime was shortsighted.