Starring Toni Gojanovic and Sergej Trifunovic. In Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Friday to Friday, December 15 to 22, at the Vancity Theatre

The logic behind the soldiers’ refusal to toke up the garrison dog is impeccable: “Someone’s got to defend this country!” So as the bored Yugoslavian conscripts stationed on the Albanian border soften the tedium with the solace of hashish while waiting for an invasion that will never come, their German shepherd has to endure the situation straight.

The absurdity of the soldiers’ predicament is shown in dozens of different ways in this unique dramatic-comedy coproduction. Jointly financed by Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, and Macedonia, Border Post looks back at the final days when those four countries were still part of a unified Yugoslavia. Enver Hoxha was still the number-one bogeyman, even though cracks were already beginning to show in the multiethnic people’s republic (the film is set in 1987, seven years after Marshal Tito’s death and four years before the collapse of the Berlin Wall).

The conscripts suffer under a bogus state of emergency declared by Lieut. Pasic because of his recently acquired syphilis, a disease he does not wish to disclose to his wife. Because one of his soldiers, Sinisa, is a half-trained doctor, Pasic relies on him for antibiotics and to relay excuses for his absence to his ever more frustrated wife.

Inevitably, as this curfew lengthens, Sinisa and Mrs. Pasic develop feelings for each other that could easily result in serious consequences. At the same time, Sinisa’s best friend, Ljuba Paunovic, decides to take the piss out of Pasic by embarking on a fake pilgrimage to Tito’s grave. The general staff will not be amused.

The first 90 percent of this film is flat-out-funny military farce. Director Rajko Grlic and cowriter Ante Tomic (who also penned the bestseller on which the film is based) are endlessly inventive when it comes to showing hilarious reactions to sexual starvation. In this universe, ideology is a tiny mouse trying to survive amid a herd of rampaging rhinoceros-sized hormones.

Of course, Balkan history being what it is, the movie’s last 10 minutes are steeped in tragedy. Like the palace guards in Hamlet who search for dangers outside Elsinore’s walls when the real perils lurk within, the protagonists of Border Post have nothing to fear from foreign foes.

From themselves, however, they have much to dread.