Emir Kusturica Film Festival

In 1997, my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I went to see a three-hour Serbian movie called Underground. We knew almost nothing about it except that it was about Yugoslavia and that it was supposed to be good. We did that sort of thing a lot back in those days. Anyway, when the lights came up afterwards my date said, in a very matter-of-fact way, "that was the best movie I've ever seen." I was pretty close to thinking the same thing as well; the movie had had an epic feel to it that was different from anything I had ever experienced before. I actually felt as though I had lived through decades of history, and, as sappy as it might sound, I was feeling a bit tearful at having to say goodbye to the characters. The director's name was Emir Kusturica, and for a while I went out of my way to look for more of his stuff. I later got to see Black Cat, White Cat at the New York Film Festival, and I was also able to rent a copy of Arizona Dreams, the only film he ever made in America, but neither of these were quite at the same level of Underground even if there was a unique sensibility there that I enjoyed.

Flash forward to a few months ago, when I stumbled across the VHS tape of the movie that I had bought all those years ago. I had only watched it once, maybe twice (as much as I loved it, it’s long and somewhat exhausting) so I figured I probably ought to give it another go before my VCR conked out and all my VHS tapes turned into garbage. Meanwhile it occurred to me that I also ought to take advantage of my Netflix subscription to dig up whatever other films by the director that were available.

So, anyway, I had a modest Emir Kusturica film festival, which was made up of three movies: Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981), When Father Was Away on Business (1985) and Underground (1987).

Do You Remember Dolly Bell? is the coming-of-age story of a teenager living in a small village outside of Sarajevo in the 1970s. A local thug asks the boy to hide a young prostitute in the second story of his family's chicken coop, and, as one might expect, the young man falls in love with the girl and must later face the harsh realities associated with her situation. The youth also comes into contact with the political realities of the time; his father is a passionate communist who is yet disaffected with the political regime in Yugoslavia, and so is nursing a wounded idealism perhaps not unlike a young man who has fallen in love with a whore.

Though the film has warmth and charm, it also has an aimless, wandering feel to it. I got the sense watching it that the director was still a bit green at that time and still finding his way as a storyteller. While the movie certainly wasn't bad, I wouldn't recommend it to a casual viewer who didn't have a particular interest in Kusturica or Yugoslavia.

The second film I watched was made four years later, and the improvement in the director's ability to carry the audience along with his story was remarkable. This time the main character was a young boy growing up in the late 1940s or early 1950s. His father makes a casual disparaging remark about a Soviet political cartoon and is sent to a work camp by the local party leader; complicating matters is the fact that the local party leader is the boy’s uncle on his mothers’ side. An even further entanglement is that the uncle had taken an interest in the father’s mistress just before he sent him away. Was it really a idealogical ostracizing, or was it something else? It is a difficult time for all involved, but eventually the political tide turns; Yugoslavia distances itself from Moscow, and the father’s black mark vanishes in a puff of nothing. However, the bitterness of lost time remains.

That may all sound like rather grim fare, but the film is much richer than that, as it is a human story with a political backdrop rather than a political polemic disguised as a human story. There’s warmth and humor, and I felt myself becoming absorbed into the lives of the people as they celebrated their happy moments and found their way through the difficult ones. There were times when I had to concentrate to follow what was going on, and times when I had the suspicion that I was lacking some piece of cultural context that would shed more light on what I was seeing, but regardless I thought it was a fantastic movie. I would recommend it enthusiastically to everyone, although there were a couple of scenes that people with “aggressively modest” sensibilities might find objectionable.

I finished up my mini-festival with a re-viewing of Underground. The story follows a love triangle through more than fifty years of history, from the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 to the terrible Bosnian War of the 1990s. The three main characters are the larger-than-life “Blackie,” his charismatic and conniving best friend Marko, and the beautiful but cowardly actress Natalija. In the first hour of the film we see Marko and Blackie channel their everyday criminal activities into supporting the resistance movement, while at the same time Blackie tries to wrest his mistress Natalija away from an admiring Nazi officer. The adventures are wild and hilarious, with bombs and brawls and prison escapes, and as the film moves on into darker territory these early scenes take on a kind of mythic quality as of some distant golden days of the past. The long middle of the film depicts the cold war in a kind of surreal, symbolic way; the hero Blackie is in hiding in an enormous underground complex while Marko convinces him and his followers that the war is still going on; meanwhile Marko has become a powerful politico under Tito, and he has taken Natalija for himself. The lies and deceit collide when Marko and Natalija must go underground to celebrate the wedding of Blackie’s son, who was an infant when the film started and is now a grown man. When Blackie realizes that he has lost Nataljia, he and his son escape to put an end to World War II once and for all, though twenty years too late. The results are bizarre, hilarious and sad. The end of the film brings us to the present, where the Bosnian war rages. Blackie is a cold-blooded militant who fights for the sake of fighting, while Marko and Nataljia have become profiteering arms dealers who are wanted by the UN as war criminals. It is as though time and sorrow has caused them to become the worst possible versions of themselves. However, this tragic ending is softened by a sweet coda which is one of the most touching scenes I have ever seen on a movie screen.

According to Wikipedia, the movie was originally a miniseries on Serbian television that aired in 1995, and that the directors’ cut of the theatrical version was a whopping 320 minutes. The film was chopped down to almost half that length, and as a result it is at times disjointed; strange ideas will suddenly appear and then be quickly left behind, and the viewer becomes unsure as to how much importance should be attributed to what he is seeing. It is also unquestionably an exhausting film to watch; at times it is almost too frenetic, with too much information being thrown at the viewer too fast, but then on the other hand it also lingers on the crazy set-piece of the rollicking underground wedding for what seems like a small eternity.

That said, I think it is an incredible film. The images and ideas are wild and wonderful, and they tell the story in a way that seems mythical but at the same time very real and human. There are tigers and monkeys and tanks and brass bands and flying brides and watermelons and birth and death and murder and suicide and war and politics and singing and pretty much every other thing that one could think of. It also helps that the three leads are incredibly charismatic in their roles; the sly huckster Malko is impossible to forget, and Mirjana Jokovic’s performance is hysterically funny; she could easily hold her own against Charlie Chaplin in a mugging contest. I wish I there were a handy youtube video of the scene where she is dancing around in a black slip to Yugoslavian pop music and whacking Marko on the head with the heel of her shoe.

Anyway, it's becoming a very hard-to-find film now, so if you ever get a chance to see it, I recommend you grab the opportunity. It's long, it's demanding, but it's also sorta kinda wonderful.

Here's a taste; the trailer is Spanish, but that's okay because there isn't any dialogue in the clips: