The Beauty of Vice

In the mountains of Montenegro people have lived for centuries by hard, unchanging rules, with modern life barely reaching them. A young married couple come down to the coast to earn a living and find work at a nudist camp. Around them are hundreds of naked bodies and an entirely different life. The encounter sends both of them questioning the rules they grew up inside. Živko Nikolić's film sets two worlds against each other without saying which is right. It does not glorify the camp as freedom or dismiss life in the mountains as backwardness; each has its own coercion and its own beauty. Mira Furlan takes the lead as a woman left alone for the first time with her own body and her own shame. It is among the most argued-over films of Yugoslav cinema.