Bolly-sholly Beograd me

Communism was a drab thing wasn’t it? Cement blocks, empty shelves in shops, queues of people with dripping noses, a uniform skin pallor somewhere around Dulux 1C7 Mercury Cloud, sort of hospital-wing grey, and blokes in bad macs talking to sexually confused Oxbridge types on park benches about tulips in Amsterdam.

Non sequitor—Bollywood that big, bright spangly boobs and bits thing that took over our lives and magazine pages last year, when Goodness Gracious Me hit the mainstream, and Mera Syal became the patron saint of all things Indo-Brit during the long Indian summer of all things sparkly.

So perhaps it does make sense that Bollywood is big in Belgrade, monochrome to technicolour, Titoism does tits ‘n’ arse to bring a bit of colour to that palely pallid flesh. As an equation on paper it sort of makes sense. Post Communism and post conflict city seeks fluffy diversion to take its mind of its Mercury Cloud recent past. But the reality of Serbia is that it is Serbia for the Serbians, and there just is not very much multi-ethnic jamming going on. It’s just not in their nature, and let us leave aside ethnic and Serbia at that point.

Where it fails on integration it makes up for in a mash of exquisite architectural clashes and junctions; arches and architraves, detailing of Ottoman and European cross-fertilisation, cobbled streets that knit together a city that has been destroyed 40 times since its appointment as the Serbian state capital in 1403, five of those being bombing campaigns of the 20th century. Yet, like its erstwhile sister city on the sea, Dubrovnik, this city of the former Yugoslavia seems somehow to have managed to transcend the historical layers of destruction. But it sure as hell hasn’t transcended Communism yet.

I was in a Communist-era hotel, nice part of town, close by to the cobbled café area of Skardalija, where the poets and writers did their black polo-neck and tortured soul thing. But not in my hotel.

Within the four walls of this particular establishment I got uniformly drab carpets, all richly impregnated with a questionable moistness and a certain amount of urea. Each floor seemed to have identical three-piece suites in that charming area outside the lift. They were a special shade of velour brown, and they all seemed to come with a fixed group of men; vodka-drinking, Olympic-smoking men (a reference to their long training rather than a Greek or cigarette brand name check). They too were uniform in their pallor, their general puffiness, both physical and smoky, and their apparent brotherhood link of showing approximately three fingers of bottom cleavage, roughly equivalent to the amount they poured into their glasses at each round—neat. But then it was 30ºC outside so perhaps it was ventilation of a kind.

My room was not much bigger than an HMP cell, maybe a foot extra all round, and you certainly don’t get a small brown fridge tightly packed with miniature vodkas at any HMP establishment, and I’ve been to a few, well, a lot actually. The lavatory flooded the bathroom floor every time I pulled the plug, more moisture and things. Oh joy. Here within those four walls Communism still reigns in a sublime unchallenged state, as it does with the national carrier: that least attractive of Communism’s additions to society, ‘You’re here in this room/seat/brown lounge, why do you expect service as well?’

That’s the grey drab. The colour came from the group that had asked me to Belgrade for the launch of a book about stardom in lusty lush Bombay, filmi citi. It came out here last summer, just ahead of the spangle stampede. I would say that wouldn’t I. Mikser, an NGO attempting to suck away the grey from the Belgrade youth scene, has translated Bollywood Boy into Serbian, even my name. Why should it give me such a thrill to see Dzastin Hardi on the spine of their edition? It did, a great humbling thrill, as did the vibrancy and longing for change among the members of Mikser, even in my wall-bouncing triple-jetlagged state stale from three weeks of filming in India in 50ºC. Imagine the bottom cleavage that those extra 20 degrees would merit in Belgrade. Staggering. Olympian.

This vital energy is something I have come across before, and again been humbled by, in other states and countries as they have tried to emerge from conflict: in Kabul at the end of the US bombing in November 2001, in Kashmir each time it seems that some kind of peace may be possible. Some call it the Beirut Syndrome, the desire to party until you fall off because tomorrow bombs may drop, but that is too gross a definition. It is simply a desire for a better kind of future out of carnage and loss.

The book launch itself came at the end of a Bollywood festival at the Rex Cultural Centre on a sultry Serbian night, surrounded by the dangling creations of a student project to design Bollywood costumes. It was fabulous, the wedding scene from Monsoon Wedding meets Prêt-à-Porter in a floaty sea of glittery Arabian Nights shoes. Not sure why they went so big on the shoes but they did. There were posters too for the festival, another part of the willing students’ project, and there was Marilyn, close up head shot with a bindi on her forehead. Shabash, as they say Dilli me, in Delhi, well done, very well done.

There was a long a passionate argument with a film critic of the old guard (read lingeringly sad Yugoslavian films that compete with French films for people taking the longest to stir a small spoon of sugar into a small cup of coffee). He started to bully a bright young thing that Bollywood films are crap. She countered with the very well argued fact that the arts elite have a anachronistic obsession with writing-off anything that is hugely popular as being of no artistic merit.

That all ended in a bar, as it should. Absinthe, the first bar and restaurant in town, again started by one of the sparks of Mikser. A place full of tall, gorgeous-looking, Olympic-smoking Serbians talking about art, film, adsinthe, the heat, and Bollywood. Shabash Belgrade’s new guard, Shabash.

Financial Times, August 29, 2003

Note for the travelling public: Serbia is a country that embraces meat-eaters, those with enthusiasm, and smokers. I plan to take a charabanc of my friends there shortly.

The author flew unwillingly with JAT Airlines. She was happily looked after by: Mikser:www.mikser.org, Absinthe bar and restaurant, Kralja Milutina 33: www.absinthe.co.yu

General information on Belgrade: www.belgradetourism.org