Belgrade-Pale-Belgrade

Shortly after crossing the frontier near Zvornik, on the road to Belgrade it came to me that I had just seen a movie: a movie called ``Republika Srpska,'' that lasted six days. The producers were great hosts; they gave me the best seats in the house; and I could see and hear the leading actorsKaradzic, Mladic, Koljevic, Gvero as well as outstanding younger players. The film began with the Serbian mothers and sisters keening and weeping at the newly dug graves of their loved ones on a hillside just inside Republika Srpska. It continued past the burned and blasted houses of Muslims. Then Pale with its little White House, situated perhaps appropriately in a former psychiatric sanatorium of a Sarajevo clinic.

Later scenes included the outskirts of Gorazde with the blackened 15th century Serbian church at Sopotica and its tombstones broken and desecrated during the Muslim days of the war. Then Grbavica, where Captain Bulajic is trying to negotiate prisoner exchanges with his Muslim counterparts.

Finally Brcko, and a drive past torched and shelled Muslim and Serbian houses to the very front lines where bunkers of the Serb troops bear the names ``Little Heaven,'' ``Texas'' and ``Little Hell.'' They were collecting honey in ``Little Heaven,'' playing cards in ``Texas'' and eating fresh wild mushrooms in ``Little Hell''the lads of the Fifth Kozara Brigade. Their spirits are high. From the Muslim trenches, 300 meters to the south comes the cry, ``Hey, Cedo!'' Dule, a Serbian soldier in camouflage yells back, ``What do you want komsija (neighbor)!'' This exchange is followed by the poppoppop of 5.56 mm dumdum bullets exploding in the trees just above us.

It all makes a good movie, a superb mixture of propaganda and reality. But that is what this Bosnian war is about, isn't iton all sides, Serbian, Muslim, Croat and, be my guest, American, too.

There is another movie running in Serbia itself these days entitled, perhaps ``A Touch of Comfort.'' The dinar is hard. The shop windows are full. The filthy streets and buildings of December are being repaired and cleaned.

The contrasts between the Republika Srpska movie and the Serbian movie are sharp. People in Pale and Brcko are more tense, more dynamic, more

determined. Perhaps more desperate. People in Belgrade seem more confused, more uncertain. Milosevic has the biggest role in this Belgrade film although he rarely appears on the screen. Another miracle of the celestial nation.

All this makes me wonder about the ugly realities out of which these movies are made, and about the equally ugly realities out of which Izetbegovic's

Sarajevo movie and Tudjman's Zagreb movie are made. I haven't had time on this trip to see them, or the Skopje movie of Gligorov and the Ljubljana movie of Kucan. But the latter are not playing to packed houses. In the case of the Serbs, I wonder whether the tail in Pale is wagging the dog in Belgrade. The tail is certainly trying.

Years ago, my oldest friend here, Sasa Nenadovic, warned me, ``We will sink our teeth into your leg, like a terrier, and you will never be able to shake us off.''

Sasa also said: ``You can do many things against the Serbs in the Balkans, but you cannot do anything without them.''

I keep this in mind and ask myself in a polite paraphrase of a Hollywood saying, ``What do I have to do to get out of this movie?''

(the author is a journalist with The New York Times)