Three review – Yugoslavian trilogy of tales tracks the horrors of the second world war

Serbian film-maker Aleksandar Petrović was a member of the former Yugoslavia’s insurgent Black Wave cinema movement ; it also included Dušan Makavejev’s WR: The Mysteries of the Organism . Now Petrović’s fascinating and mysterious anti-war triptych Three, from 1965, has been revived, performed and presented in a distinctively self-aware, almost theatrical way. It’s a succession of three interlinked tales from the horror of the second world war, based on stories by Serbian author Antonije Isaković .

Milos, played by Serbian actor Velimir “Bata” Zivojinovic, is a student who is to become an anti-German partisan after the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia and then, at the war’s end, a cold, calculating communist state-security officer. In the first story, we see a crowd of terrified civilians in 1941, waiting for the Nazis’ imminent invasion. A platoon of soldiers nervously strut around, unsure what to do, and some more wait on a stationary train, awaiting orders to move out and laughing blearily at a group of Gypsies who are playing music and cruelly displaying a dancing bear. A line of recruits, still in their civilian clothes, wait for instructions. At this stage, Milos is a student among the crowd, and he witnesses a journalist with a camera being instantly shot on the orders of a jumpy soldier, because he appears to be a spy; the one person who could have spoken up for him, his wife, arrives on the scene with their child, too late. “Because of the likes of you we lost Kosovo in 1389!” shouts someone in the crowd, a folk memory of national resentment which was to be revived during the 1990s Balkan wars.

The second section shows this same Milos, now an armed partisan (with no bullets left in his Luger), running terrified across hostile terrain, pursued by Germans. He is heading through a swamp towards the Adriatic, evidently to rejoin his unit. He meets up with another partisan and they run together, chased by a sadistic German airman who toys with them, spraying bullets left and right. This courageous friend is to save Milos’s life by distracting the German pursuers away from him, and fated to be executed in the cruellest way possible.

Finally, around 1944, Milos appears again; he is no longer the dishevelled partisan but an officer and functionary, sleekly kitted out with greatcoat over his shoulders, brooding over his typewritten report of a group of Gestapo officers that have been captured, together with the mistress of one. The prisoners stand blankly about in the village square awaiting the inevitable execution, but the woman keeps looking up at Milos’s office window, catching his gaze with hers as he looks down. Does Milos desire her? Might he save her life?

Each of the three stories points up the chaos and the horror of war; nothing here shows an actual military engagement or an equal meeting of armies on the field of battle – just bullying and fear and judicial murder. What is going on in Milos’s mind? Has he become radicalised and brutalised by his experience of Nazi brutality, and now no better than his tormentors? Did the experience of seeing the journalist’s execution trigger his own ruthlessness and his own hunger for survival? Or was this intelligent young student always destined for his own bureaucratic career of distinction? An intriguingly structured, coolly dispassionate drama.

• Three is on Klassiki from 1 August.