For a film about Nazis, the Cold War, and the more recent horrors to visit the former Yugoslavia, Emir Kusturica's epic allegory of his vanished country is a surprisingly bracing breath of fresh air. Much like the entire history of the country in which it is set and the period it traces (from the 1941 Nazi invasion and occupation through the Tito years to the atrocities of war-torn 1992), the controversial Underground is filled with brash, vulgar, bitterly discordant clamor, but it is as ferociously funny as it is fiercely tragic, and will leave you not only saddened and exhausted but strangely invigorated and thoughtful.
A roiling pot of conflicting concerns and tones, the film confirms Kusturica's understanding of the naturally clashing absurdities in human beings at the core of his or any country's dilemmas, and suggests that those absurdities are ripe for burlesque. Underground is a carnival-like ride - as much about drunken revelry, weddings, brass bands, chimps, and erotic dancing as it is about war and politics - an adrenalin rush of true horror and slapstick humor, in tone a kind of Balkan Catch-22. But it also makes room for images of the fantastic - a white goose in flight can signify death's release of the soul, while the spirits of dead loved ones might be seen swimming untroubled in the Danube.
The effectiveness of these images is a measure of its director's considerable skills honed in four previous features, three of which seem like frozen time-capsules from a vanished pre-war Yugoslavia. Those films, Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981), When Father Was Away On Business (1985), and Time of the Gypsies (1989), increasingly mingled dream-like imagery with forthright naturalism, and often located humor in dire narrative circumstances. But none of them prepare us for the compelling exorbitance of Underground.
With their pistols firing wildly and a raucous brass band in tow (the music in Kusturica's films is often played by musicians on screen who sometimes intrude on the action), Kusturica introduces us to Marko and Blacky (played with anarchic, charismatic abandon by Miki Manojilovic and Lazar Ristovski) as they drunkenly return from celebrating Blacky's induction into the Communist Party. Awaiting them is Ivan (Slavko Stimac), Marko's slow-witted zookeeper brother whose parrot refers to Marko and Blacky as hooligans.
Almost as if the Marx brothers had wandered outside the confines of Duck Soup into a battlefield of real terror, Kusturica plunges his characters into the chaos of the next morning's Nazi bombing raid. We see Marko using the nearby explosions to intensify his tryst with a prostitute, even climaxing after she flees, while Blacky stubbornly continues to eat breakfast as a chandelier crashes before him. When he defiantly bites the electrical cord in two, his hair stands on end. Throughout, Kusturica shocks us as a horrified Ivan watches the bombing of his beloved zoo.
As the Nazis take over, Marko and Blacky become successful raiding convoys and selling arms on the black market. Accustomed to taking what he wants, the voracious, brawling philanderer Blacky kidnaps Natalija (Mirjana Jokovic), a leading Yugoslavian actress during a performance while her lover Franz (Ernst Stotzner), a Nazi officer, observes from the front row. But Blacky is also an easily-duped patriot, 
eager for the next utopian dream, and Marko, the conniving, opportunistic gangster, finds it easy to betray and manipulate him. After Blacky is arrested and tortured in a scene resembling a Three Stooges routine, Marko comes to his rescue but not before Blacky is severely injured in a hilariously cartoonish accident involving a large trunk and a hand grenade.
Hunted for his criminal activities and eager to seduce Natalija away from Blacky, Marko ensconces Blacky, Ivan and his pet chimp, and others in a massive cellar under the pretense of protecting them. Acting as a liaison with the surface, he persuades them to manufacture arms (ostensibly for Tito's resistance fighters) to feed his black market operation. For nearly 20 years, Marko (who has become a Tito confidant) and Natalija dupe them into believing the war continues to rage over their heads. Their opportunity to surface finally arrives during the wedding of Blacky's son Jovan (Srdan Todorovic) when a horrible mishap involving the chimp and a tank they've built reveals a massive network of tunnels leading to the capitals of Europe. Hilariously, Blacky's and Jovan's first encounter with the world above ground is the set of a propaganda film being made about their lives that they mistake for reality.
Kusturica's vision of Yugoslavian history as an absurd fable is apt when one considers its emergence following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire after World War I. Formerly the kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Yugoslavian identity was anything but integrated as its weakened and disunited peoples contentiously stumbled through parliamentary politics in the 20s, dictatorship in the 30s, and, after World War II, decades under the heel of Communism.
It's understandable, then, that Kusturica would spin a tale of friends and brothers living an illusion who perpetrate lies, betray each other, and who ultimately awaken from their illusions of the Communist years to a long-brewing reality more nightmarish than any fiction they might devise. In the devastating third act, the film's principal characters, driven by greed, desperation, and revenge, meet again during the war in Bosnia, and the full horror of the words, "There is no war until a brother kills a brother" or, one might add, until a friend blindly kills a friend, is revealed.
For nearly two hours Kusturica has captivated us with the song and dance of a carnivalesque dream while referring throughout to the myth-making machinery of history and the cinema's complicity. In the final 45 minutes he jolts us awake and wipes the smiles off our faces with a powerful blow down deep where it hurts. The entertaining excursion has inevitably led to a destination of doom. That he still manages a transcendent note of optimism at the end is a measure of his belief in the spirit of a people who must, even when all is lost, laugh in the face of death.
Underground has had to wait two years to gain a limited release in this country though it may be the most entertaining film to play American screens this year. Certainly, that is indicative of a generally shrinking U.S. market for foreign language films (unless, of course, they happen to feature mouth-watering culinary delights), but few here are aware of the controversy that killed the film at the box office in France and must have caused some nervousness among American distributors.
Shortly after Underground won the Palm D'Or at Cannes in 1995 (it's a shame it didn't share the award with Theo Anelopoulos's Ulysses Gaze, that year's other masterpiece about the Balkans), French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut blasted Kusturica in the pages of Le Monde (though he hadn't seen the film at the time) for making what he called "Serbian propaganda." His complaint was with newsreel footage included early in the film that seems to show Slovenians in Maribor and Croatians in Zagreb lining the streets to cheer the invading Nazis while showing only devastation in Belgrade, implying to Finkielkraut that for Kusturica resistance was exclusively Serbian.
The accusation set off a long-running debate among Parisian intellectuals (chronicled by Adam Gopnik in a February 1996 issue of "The New Yorker"), some of whom rushed to Kusturica's defense. Finkielkraut's follow-up article, after he had actually seen the film, seemed to express his true reservations, as dangerous as they might be, as he warned of "...the growth of a kind of baroque nationalism, of which Underground is an example. All that terrible Slav sentimentalism that I hate - all these weddings and drunken embraces, spilling over into the love of violence." Then, in the March 1996 issue of Sight and Sound, Tony Rayns responded by complaining that "The film's real political problem is not that it fails to be 'correctly' partisan but that it rests on nostalgia for a national identity which it simultaneously exposes as a skillfully manipulated illusion."
Clearly, Finkielkraut's original accusation was specious, given the balance of the film. One suspects that his real complaint was that Kusturica had not made his film a condemnation of Serbian aggression and war crimes. Underground is certainly a caustic satire, but Kusturica clearly eyes all his characters with an equal degree of critical scrutiny while vilifying no one completely. Crucially, the ridicule he displays is anything but divisive, and, to these eyes, cancels any possibility for mere nostalgia. Moreover, his inclusion of the sometimes violent and lusty appetites of his people in desperate times expresses that sometimes insanity is the only sane response to an insane world, while at the same time he is celebrating their vigorous will to survive. It is these things that make his criticisms of them - that they often cannot see the forest for the trees - that much more judicious. After all, an artist's demonization of any people, no matter how vile their actions, dehumanizes them and therefore alienates them from the humanity - the audience - he seeks to make empathetic.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Contents this page were published in the November/December, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1997 WFP Collective, Inc.