By Robert St. Martin
One of the more surprising films of this year’s SEEfest Film Festival in Los Angeles was Nemanja Bečanović’s Supermarket – a unexpected gem of a film from Montenegro and Montenegro’s Oscar submission for Best International Feature Film in 2025. The film opens with a series of shots of shelves and refrigerators with the assortment of an unnamed supermarket and an info card with opening hours. The fact that this large Supermarket is closed, however, does not mean that it is empty: One man (Bojan Žirović) has stayed inside the Supermarket and spent the night. His behavior, however, suggests that he is using the opportunity for splurging rather than just surviving the night in the supermarket.
Namely, he takes and tries out various foods and treats in miniature quantities, then returns the packaging to as original, “untouched” a state as possible. In the process, he also tries out non-food products and diligently cuts out pictures of starlet Mimi (Ana Pejović) from gossip magazines and pastes them into his collector’s notebook.
As this unnamed man records date entries in his notebook, we come to reveal through his obsessive-compulsive rituals that he lives in the Supermarket. He is a kind of consumerist Robinson Crusoe, stranded among the products offered by this slick modern supermarket. He carefully opens product after product, taking only the top layer and putting the rest back so that future buyers won’t notice anything. This development makes us think that the film is actually a critique of the society we live in and capitalism in general.
Sampling the products offered in the Supermarket seemed to a fictionalized version of French economist Thomas Piketty’s theories presented in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Filmmaker Bečanović shows how much his hero is paranoid about whether he is being observed by the many surveillance cameras in the Supermarket.
Eventually the unnamed hero comes to realize that he is not alone but there is someone in the supermarket and that person is sending him signals that could be threatening. When the second man (Branimir Popović) finally appears dressed in a protective suit and when we hear a word spoken for the first time, the viewer’s guessing game is redirected from the intruder in the supermarket to the world around him or them, and the reasons why he/she is/are there. the dynamic between him and Žirović works quite well and, with the still superb music and well-directed camerawork, these scenes have a powerful effect, despite the fact that the location of the action has not changed.
The criticism of capitalism as a system seemingly imperceptibly becomes a criticism of modern life because it becomes clear to us that the supermarket is actually the place by which we measure our day, trade daily, consume daily, lead our lives from and to going shopping, and these capitalist islands represent the essence of our lives.
The heroes of the film, who are the antithesis of that, because they do not leave the supermarket, are the modern Vladimir and Estragon, two characters doomed to meet in the same place every day with one key difference – they are not lost waiting for Godot, for some solution, they are waiting for Nothing, they simply happen, without meaning, reason and direction. It is as if the director (who is also the screenwriter) is telling us that today even an absurd novel can no longer be written, because that last hope has disappeared – that some Godot can be met in a world dominated by supermarkets. In a nod to our current obsession with “reality television,” the two characters become increasingly aware of their “performance” for the surveillance cameras which may or may not actually be videotaping their actions as a “reality television” show for an unknown audience.
Bečanović, however, is not interested in offering us any concrete answers to numerous questions posed by the film but only serves up allusions that again give rise to new questions. This can be frustrating, especially for an unprepared viewer, but the essence of the story with “Supermarket” is that the film still drives and “trips” perfectly, while commenting on the world around us with dark humor, and on a slightly higher philosophical level than the banal statements that are often served to us as wisdom.
Bečanovic’s last film The Ascent came out 12 years ago. Supermarket shows us how Bečanović likes to play and experiment more than to compromise with other people’s expectations. And when the film “drives”, then it doesn’t matter that it is “strange.” In the end, the key to interpreting this film and this world we experience as “simulacrum” is not important, because each of these possible interpretations (deviation, simulation, post-apocalypse, reality show, and finally, projection) can be at least partially true, but none of them has to be the correct answer.
