Director Dragan Bjelogrlic’s dreamy sports-themed allegory Montevideo is a sepia-toned, rose-coloured recollection of a time when football united a nation. The story of the small, dirt-poor team that represented Serbia at the first FIFA World Cup in 1930 shamelessly trots out every 'triumphant underdog’ cliché, but still it can sit proudly alongside other lump-in-the-throat male-weepies as The Natural (1984) and Rocky (1976).
Named after the Uruguayan city where the inaugural World Cup event was held, Bjelogrlic’s adaptation of journalist Vladimir Stankovic’s best-selling book utilises a series of recollections by a disabled shoeshine boy (Predrag Vasic). The story device might satisfy those who wouldn’t accept the film’s picture-perfect depiction of gleeful small town folk in 1930s Serbia. It’s effective, despite a lack of clarity over how the boy could recall bedroom dalliances, locker room tensions or boardroom strategising.
The central relationship concerns natural talent/poor boy Aleksandar 'Tirke' Tirnanic (Milos Bikovic) and playboy/superstar Blagoje 'Mosa’ Marjanovic (Petar Strugar). The two become friends when they’re thrown together on the front line of the struggling local team, Belgrade Sports Club BSC. As the club hierarchy struggles to keep the team afloat, the opportunity arises to create a national team (no easy task, considering the ongoing tensions between Yugoslavs and Serbs). The film simmers with political/social/regional issues of the time, but Bjelogrlic addresses them in the most perfunctory manner; Montevideo is first and foremost about sporting dreams and it rarely strays into deeper, darker territory.
Team unity is strained when Tirke and Mosa are divided over (you guessed it) beautiful women. Rosa (Danina Jeftic), the voluptuous, small town innocent, adores Tirke, but her football-mad father conspires to set her up with Mosa; vampish Valeria (Nina Jankovic) is a free-spirited bohemian who seduces Mosa and finds much fun in pitting him against Tirke. Apart from the subtitles, it’s Jankovic’s Valeria who most clearly provides a point of difference between the film’s European origins and its feel-good Western equivalent. (The only American sports film to feature such a beautiful creature entirely naked so often is Seabiscuit.)
With a running time of 140 minutes, Bjelogrlic completely milks the sappy, nationalistic sentiment for all it’s worth; even for this passionate lover of The World Game, the heavy-handedness became tiresome. Rosa and Tirke define their blossoming romance in cinematic terms ('In the movies, they kiss with their eyes closed," he tells her) and the debutant director’s flowery retelling of this true-life tale similarly relies upon some well-worn movie magic to weave its spell.
To its credit, though, the staging of the game action is particularly well-handled (all actors seem to have a degree of on-field technical mastery) and the period detail is superb. Having endured decades of Hollywood’s sports-over-adversity films, no one should begrudge Eastern Europe’s filmmakers a little treacly, tear-jerking sentiment of their own with this rare entry into that crowd-pleasing genre. And besides, the film was a huge hit in its homeland and has been selected to represent Serbia in the Foreign Language Film category at the 2012 Academy Awards.
