"With pain, sorrow and joy, we shall remember our country as we tell our children stories that start like fairytales. Once upon a time there was a country...'"
These lines closed the curtain on "Underground", Kusturica's most achieved movie about an 'unachieved' history. Indeed, "close" isn't even an appropriate verb to use since "the story had no end" whatsoever. But it was a bittersweet way to insist on Yugoslavia not being dead because it stopped belonging to current maps. The country, as a memory rather than a flag, would live as long as there would be great stories and that doesn't go without great storytellers.
So I open this review with the following statement: Emir Kusturica is certainly the most important Balkans' figure after Tito, and it's only because of the former's historical aura. I don't think any other politician, athlete, artist, celebrity no matter how preeminent and successful they were, would leave as an indelible mark in the legacy of this fascinating and tragedy-stricken land as Kusturica did, counterbalancing all the negativity brought by the news and the images conveyed by NATO or UN representatives.
Many of us have grown indeed with the images of the Balkans as a doomed placed with soldiers, refugees, barricades, burnings houses. I came to age in the early 90's and along with Israel and Palestine, Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia were 'routine' news as far back as I can remember. But as if Kusturica was aware of that reducing cliché, he gratifies us with a small but significant scene that sums up the way the proud Oriental feels about the Occidental vision. Luka, the film's protagonist, played by Slavco Stimac, an engineer working in a railway station in the Serbian mountains, is tired of hearing the same CNN-like news every day about the conflict, so he throws the TV on the railway, the news go on so he must resort to shooting the screen.
Maybe engrossed by blind patriotism, Luka was oblivious to the inevitability of war, his mind focused on his son Milos, a wannabe football player dreaming to join the Belgrade team, and to a lesser degree his mentally unstable wife Jadranka, graced with the kind of voice that shouldn't get too close to someone who wears glasses. Not totally optimistic, Luka didn't overestimate people, he overestimated the country. Stimac had played the naïve brother with a stammer in "Underground" and who discovered with shock as an old man that Yugoslavia ceased to exist. So the film works like a chronological continuation to "Underground" but with a Kusturica who took some time to digest the war's aftermath and the ill-reception of his Golden Palm winner.
It took Kusturica almost ten years to get back to the war. Meanwhile he concocted a zany comedy "Black Cat, White Cat" like an elixir to expire all the demons that could have poisoned his inspiration. And while I expected more drama in "Life is a Miracle" I was glad to find myself in familiar territories again with colorful characters, enjoying life and ignoring war even when it strikes them in the face. And I mean that literally. In fact, all the people in the film have one thing in common, they don't care about war: a man is worried for his son's future, his opera-singing wife flirts with his coach for the same reason, the son isn't too eager to play with guns, and seeing how the soldiers handle bazookas, you wouldn't blame him. Even war profiteers only care for coke and human traffic.
"Life is a miracle" is set in a sort of twilight zone of surreal fantasy or a tragic circus à la Kusturica.. And like Barnum, Kusturica knows how to use animals as fully developed characters in his movies, it's the death of a turkey that seals the hero's coming-of-age start in "Time of the Gypsies", it's animal panic in the zoo that announce the German bombings, and the scene with the bears in "Miracle" echoes the incongruous elephant wandering on the street in "Underground" or the use of the black and the white cat as wedding witnesses. Animals are integral to the story and it's by seeing a chicken laying eggs that Luka's jovial friend says "life is a miracle", his encounter with the bears will play like a darker omen. In another scene, Jadranka is chatting on a phone, a cat and a dog fight for a pigeon, they have their priorities straight as if they were one step ahead of humans.
And this is where the mule plays as a magnificent Chekov's gun, the animal blocks the railway, standing there, with tears seemingly dropping from the eyes. According to his master, the mule's sad because the "sweetheart" won't come back. There's something fascinating in the way the animal foreshadows the coming romance and even its conclusion... because beyond everything the film, like all other Kusturica's films, it's a romance. Not any romance, but one à la "Romeo and Juliet" between Luka the Serbian and Sabaha (Natasa Tapuskovic), the Bosnian hostage kept in his house to be exchanged with his son taken as a war prisoner. Sabana becomes a light of hope for Luka and naturally, they get closer and closer. There comes a point where life finds a way. "Life is a miracle" indeed.
And the film is another occasion for dazzling and poetic imagery with the two couple literally flying over the land, belonging to no country anymore, simply to each other as if the bond of hearts can transcend any frontier. We knew that already after venturing in the realms of Emir's imagination, a world where marriages were the occasion for crazy celebrations, where glasses are broken and truths spoken, movies where even death couldn't conceal that lust for life and made the party end, whatever happened.
Whether it reflects a truth of the ex-Yugoslavian people or a fantasy in Emir's mind, the show had to go on... the Barnum way, the Shakespeare way... or the Fellini way.
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