Circles

In Circles, Serbian director Srdan Golubovic dramatizes the need for warring factions to move beyond their animosities. 

The film is framed by the start and the end of a scene in Bosnia, 1993, based on an actual event. The golden Serbian off-duty soldier Marko sees three colleagues brutalize a Muslim civilian, the tobacconist Haris. When Marko intervenes, Haris runs off but the soldiers turn on Marko and kill him. Marko’s young doctor friend watches helpless, while other citizens look away.

The bulk of the film shows the characters still dealing with that death in Serbia, 2008, their wounds having outlived the war. Marko’s fiancee Nada drifted off after her loss, married a brute and is now trying to escape his menacing pursuit of their young son. Haris helps her find a job and flat, then pays for her son’s passport to enable her escape to Bosnia, where her husband faces arrest. The husband gives Haris a second severe beating but refrains from killing him, his eyes tearing up when he realizes he has lost his son. 

Marko’s aging father Ranko is still alienated from the widow of one of Marko’s assailants. He refuses to employ their grown son on his project, to relocate an old stone church from the power plant to a country hilltop. The church is an emblem of taking the moral high road. At the young man’s persistence the old man softens, gives in, comes to accept him, and as he speeds him to a hospital after an accident cradles his head and tells the driver the boy is his son. 
     Haris phones Ranko on the anniversary date of Marko’s death. Now he calls him after this second beating. Though living in Germany now, Haris repays his debt to Marko by attending to his survivors.

Marko’s doctor friend is now the only surgeon who can perform the operation that will save the life of Todor — the leader of Marco’s assault — after a serious traffic accident. The man recognizes him and futilely tries to get a different surgeon. The doctor is at first unwilling to save his friend’s killer’s life, especially when the brute denies remorse and calls him a “pussy” for his moral considerations. Post-operation this brute too tears up in gratitude for having been saved.  

One recurring motif is the long shot of a long winding road, like the one down which Ranko drags the crippled worker. It’s an emblem of the long route to redemption, through forgiveness.

The first part of the 2008 narrative seems to affirm the adage, “No good deed goes unpunished.” But each character finds the exception: “…except those that confront the punishment for the first one.” 

The title has two implications. At one point Ranko muses that a stone dropped in water sends out spreading circles, but a good man’s deeds don’t. In this film Marko’s death ends up having positive effects on the others, on Haris immediately and on the others up to 12 years later. They manage to break the circle of violence and hatred begetting violence and hatred.