This 15-part series was one of the most ambitious projects in modern Serbian television production, and the actor and producer Goran Šušljik (who played one of the main roles) threw himself into the screen adaptation of Dobrica Ćosić’s novel. His novels “Sinner”, “Apostate” and “Vernik”, published in the second half of the eighties, caused quite a bit of controversy at the time because they described the origin of socialist Yugoslavia in a significantly different way from what was established dogma. The action in the series takes place from 1939 (with occasional flashbacks to earlier periods in order to get additional depth of the story and the background of the characters’ relationships) until the collapse of the Republic of Užice, i.e. until the end of 1941.
Here, we follow how the situation in Serbia looked before and at the beginning of World War II, and occasionally it is supplemented with archival recordings of that period. There is also a first-class cast made up of numerous well-known Serbian theater and film actors, and one of the main roles is the well-known Croatian actor Goran Bogdan. He is Bogdan Dragović, a communist pioneer who joined the party immediately after the First World War, but after being released from prison in the mid-1930s and going on a mission to Paris at the behest of Moscow, in the late 1930s he was declared a traitor, a Trotskyist, because he publicly rebelled against Stalin’s methods. .
Although it is obvious that Bogdan is an orthodox, sincere communist, his comrades renounced and rejected him, and after years of waiting, his wife, Milena (Nada Šargin), left him as well, who was tired of waiting. Milena is the daughter of a prominent Belgrade politician, republican and eternal oppositionist Vukašin Katic (Žarko Laušević), an uncompromising idealist who is an eternal critic of the monarchy and a man aware that such a centralized monarchy has no future. Obviously, he is a wealthy and wealthy man, but practically all members of his family have become infected with communist thought. His son Ivan (Radovan Vujović) is an intellectual, and Bogdanova and Milena’s son Vladimir (it’s not hard to guess who this student is named after!) is also a staunch communist, furious and resentful of his father who, according to his comrades, betrayed the party.
There are countless other important characters. One of them is Comintern agent Petar Bajević (Šušljik), once Bogdan’s best friend who is now in a secret relationship with Milena, while Ivan Živković is directing. And the main actors are really excellent, and for this kind of content, the slightly theatrical, theatrical style is perfect, although at times this series goes into unnecessary melodramatics, the dialogues are occasionally forced, and some subplots seem pointless and unnecessary. However, “Vreme zla” is not only a banal series, but here the revolutionary period of the early forties is treated studiously, in-depth and above all with high quality.
Although the main characters are fictional, some historical figures occasionally appear, such as governor Pavle (Sergej Trifunović), president of the Kvisli government during the German occupation, Milan Nedić, and many others. Starting with Vukašin and passing through Bogdan to Vladimir, all the characters seem to be torn between their duty to family and country, ideas and ideals. We see here how naive those pre-war communists were, who functioned on a remote control from Moscow, and we understand that blindness by these ideas of revolution, stories about brotherhood, unity and equality, not even realizing that the Soviet Union under Stalin was a totalitarian state of terror, blood and hunger .
But the fact is that these same communists were the only ones who had the balls to resist the Nazis and their helpers during the occupation. One of the strongest assets of this series is certainly the well-built, well-rounded characters whose motivations we can understand and we can understand the internal and external conflicts that they carry. Although few series today have 15 episodes, there are not (too many) unnecessary drags and loss of focus, and by the end we realize that practically all ten or fifteen main characters really have their function in the story and they are all equally important. As I normally like content like this, the action of which is set in a historical period, especially this interesting and complex one, I really enjoyed watching “Time of Evil”.