Word: balkanized
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Working under wacky if self-imposed constraints, Cocteau might be expected to create contrived plot. And he does. The Eagle With Two Heads tells the story of a young queen in an unnamed Balkan kingdom who withdraws from the world in response to the assasination of her husband. Seen by no one, she leads a nomadic existence, sleeping in a different castle every night and avoiding all company. On the 10th anniversary of her husband's murder, Stanislas, a young anarchist poet who just happens to be the king's exact double, climbs up to her window to kill...
...Continent's poorest and most backward country, Albania is a wedge of Balkan territory on the southern Adriatic coast between Yugoslavia and Greece. An agrarian land where workers earn an average wage of $85 a month, the country is as rigid economically as it is politically. Albania even broke relations with the Soviet Union in 1961 and China in 1978 after those powers experimented with early liberalization programs. Since he succeeded the late dictator Enver Hohxa in 1985, President Ramiz Alia, 65, has only gradually modified the most egregious of his predecessor's restrictive policies...
...guest identified himself as a diplomat attached to the Bulgarian embassy in Belgrade, but he had come to see me in an "entirely private and unofficial capacity." He said he was "a personal friend" of Lukanov's, who had apparently contacted him through some sort of Balkan back channel and asked him to prevail on me, "very discreetly," not to run the story...
...little of that dreadful impact comes across in the film, which is too respectful of its subject to find more in it than noble cliches. Salamo Arouch (Willem Dafoe), formerly the Balkan middleweight champ, is interned with his family at Birkenau and soon ordered to take part in boxing exhibitions in which the loser will almost certainly be killed. This grisly dilemma -- each of Arouch's knockouts sends his opponent to the gas chamber -- is mostly evaded in Robert M. Young's bland direction. The film's only and considerable virtue lies in its documentation of the desperate strategies people...
...theory about why psychoanalysis, and indeed "all modern methods of treatment for mental disturbances," first emerged in Vienna. The fact that Sigmund Freud lived there is too easy. More fundamental was the half-hidden disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, defeated on the battlefield by Prussia, torn apart by Balkan nationalism and devastated by the bank crash...