This sleek, turbo-charged pulp thriller plunges its shaven-headed anti-hero into a stylised 60s Balkans underworld. Every crime movie cliché is galvanised by the panache of the film’s electric razor-sharp noir style.
There's a glee in this visceral plunge into nastiness that's hard to resist... Sometimes a roll in the mud just feels so goddamn good.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2009
Zift 2008
A turbo-charged exercise in shirtless, bullet-headed machismo, Zift plunges us into a 60s netherworld of communist era prisons, subterranean torture chambers and ancient taverns where no sun ever shone. The men, uniformed and otherwise, are all felons, and the femmes all fatales. Every underworld cliché of Balkan degradation is galvanised by the fluid panache of director Javor Gardev's electric, razor-sharp noir style. His wise-cracking, frequently butt-naked protagonist, newly sprung from jail, goes looking for the diamond that disappeared during the heist. Could his partners in crime, notably the sultry nightclub artiste Ada, possibly know where it went? To put the question another way, how lowdown and devious can a comrade be? Even the subtitles, engorged with lurid metaphors, are on steroids. The first Bulgarian film in years to make an impact on the international circuit is not regarded with universal pride in the land that begat it. — BG