Underground

UNDERGROUND   ****

Emir Kusturica

1995

IDEA:  The decades-long saga of two Yugoslav friends, from their years in the resistance during WWII to the bloody Balkan wars of the 1990s.

BLURB:  In its decadent, carnivalesque spectacle and inspired knockabout physical comedy, Underground often calls to mind an Eastern European acid-trip mix of Fellini, the Marx Brothers, and Looney Tunes. Yet no comparison can really suffice in describing the experience of Emir Kusturica’s one-of-a-kind opus, a scabrous, rambunctious historical epic bursting at the seams with lunatic energy and invention. Molding and bedazzling 40 years of turbulent Yugoslav history into a fiery, truly massive-scale tragic-farce, Kusturica produces at once an absurdist national myth, a howling orgiastic inferno of sociopolitical chaos and delusion, and, once it gets to its inevitably grim denouement, a jeremiad for a people irreparably fractured by waves of systemic exploitation and internecine violence. Just as it overflows with a parade of outsize metaphors - zoo animals, meta-theatrical productions, the titular subterranean space and its suppressed and blinded denizens - Underground positively explodes with sheer cinematic brio. The film is, if nothing else, a breathtakingly sustained high-wire act of immaculately controlled pandemonium, with mise-en-scène, choreography, shot construction, editing, music, and performance calibrated to reach Everest-level heights of artful insanity. It’s frequently gobsmacking. And although it’s also exceedingly easy to get lost in the delirium, to wonder, at the odd interval at which your mind isn’t reeling, if the politics haven’t also been buried in the onslaught, Underground goes on to disarm such qualms through the force of its audacity. This isn’t national history written as textbook grand narrative, or even as fictional document, but as Rabelaisian reflection, nightmare, and dream.