76: Underground

            It’s difficult to know if the jury at the 1995 Cannes film festival expected their choice for the Palme D’or to be controversial.  Since its exhibition at that festival, Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995) has been denounced by Bosnians for an alleged pro-Serbian subtext, and described as a lengthy piece of propaganda in support of an untied Yugoslavia.  Being unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the political stances of Eastern Europe I’m certainly not qualified to make any such judgments.  However, I am certain that this film is hilarious, though admittedly in the darkest of ways.  Somehow it manages to be both a startling portrayal of war and a subtle farce that briefly glorifies those who would profit from the suffering of others during such times.

            This is yet another film that had my mind reeling for a way to describe it; composing a pitch in hindsight.  It’s Soldier of Orange (1977; #85) meets Blast from the Past (1999).  It all begins on the night before the Nazis invade Belgrade.  Two smalltime conmen, Marko (Miki Manojlovic) and Blacky (Lazar Ristovski), drunkenly gallivant through the streets.  They are followed by a parade of musicians who seem to function as both the men’s entertainment and a subtle Greek chorus.  Marko drops Blacky off to his suspicious and pregnant wife before making his own way to a whore house.  The German Blitzkrieg strikes the following morning, just as both men reap the consequences of the seeds sown the night before.  Lost in the attack is the Belgrade zoo, which Marko’s younger stuttering brother Ivan was the caretaker of.  Overcome with grief, Ivan wanders the streets, still burning and covered with rubble, carrying an infant chimp. 

After the surrender, locals are recruited to help rebuild the destroyed city under German authority.  In this environment of deprivation, Marko and Blacky become players in the city’s black market, smuggling luxury items and running guns to various pockets of the resistance forces.  Both men are wanted, but Blacky evokes particular ire from the local Nazi commander as the two men compete for the affection of Natalija (Mirjana Jokovic), a famous stage actress. 

When searches for Marko and Blacky become too difficult to avoid, they are forced to hide in an elaborate bunker in Marko’s Grandfather’s home.  They take friends and family into hiding with them, including Ivan and his chimp, but the difficult process of going underground causes Blacky’s wife to die in labor.  His infant son Jovan becomes the youngest resident of the bunker. 

After several years of quietly continuing their smuggling operation, Blacky resolves to bring Natalija to live with him in the underground chamber.  He steals her right off of the stage and attempts to kill her Nazi beau in the process.  When this plan goes awry, both Blacky and Marko bumble their way to hero status, somehow surviving a kidnapping plot and several instances of torture.  When Blacky is injured in the process he descends to the bunker to manage a subterranean arms manufacturing company, leaving Marko to handle the business end of things above ground.

The operation runs smoothly enough until Marko falls for Natalija, and decides he’ll stop at nothing to have her.  The deceptions that play into the middle segments of the film are both hilarious and heartbreaking.  For nearly twenty years Marko convinces the residents of the bunker that the war hasn’t ended, all the while making profits from the weapons they manufacture.  He marries Natalija publicly, but has her occasionally return to the bunker to relay stories about the Nazis rape of the country, always encouraging her to lead Blacky on in the process. 

This is only about half of what Underground has to offer.  Indeed it is one of the more complex plots I’ve had the pleasure of describing in these writings.  It takes unconventional turns and rarely has a definitive tone, choosing instead to ride the line between nostalgic patriotism and quirky irreverence.  It is a film that plays its cards close to the chest, never descending into all-out farce until long after the audience is hooked. 

Though comical throughout Underground is a film that begs serious questions about the nature of family, war, friendship, betrayal, and the lengths people will go to deceive both themselves and others.  It is a war film that never glamorizes death, but never takes it too seriously either.  It accepts the fact that in a world of madness, sanity is crazy.  Underground gives us characters to love and sequences to cherish (Natalija’s drunken pole dance on a tank barrel is delightful, as is Blacky’s escape from a mental hospital) without forcing either on us, letting us decide for ourselves how we feel about them.  And through it all are those musicians, never fully present or totally absent from the action.  I’m sure that they could be interpreted several ways, but I prefer to think of them as Marko and Blacky do, as the accompaniment to their magnificent parade through life.

Language: Serbian/German/French/Russian

Runtime: 167 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off