Above ground

Emir Kusturica comes up for air

When I was in Greece last fall, the discos were jumping to the riveting, trumpet-propelled Gypsy soundtrack of Underground, the music remaining after Emir Kusturica's pulsating film had played and gone. Meanwhile, America waited. At last, Underground opens at the Coolidge Corner this Friday, almost two and a half years after winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes. For both economic and political reasons, American distributors have been wary about taking it on.

For one thing, Underground bounces onward for 169 minutes, and however ambitious and entertaining it may be, that's long for a picture from Serbia starring unfamiliar actors with formidable-looking names. Also, not a single Yugoslav picture has made a dime in the USA since Dusan Makavejev's 1981 Montenegro, and that includes Kusturica's previous Palme d'Or winner, the wonderful 1985 When Father Was Away on Business.

Another box-office problem: Underground dwells in part on that ethnic war in the Balkans -- which is still incomprehensible to most globally challenged Americans. Do they want to pay to watch Bosnia explode? How many people want to see any kind of war movie at all? It's an unpopular genre, especially for genteel arthouse audiences.

The most substantial question for a distributor was whether to get tied to a movie produced under cloudy political circumstances. Kusturica, a Moslem from Sarajevo, supported Slobodan Milosevic's Serbs through much of the Bosnian War. He made Underground in part with money and help from Milosevic's plunderous government. Although he's edged a bit away from Milosevic in the last several years (speaking, though enigmatically, at an anti-government Belgrade student rally), Kusturica can never go back to war-destroyed Sarajevo, where he shot his first film, Do You Remember Dolly Bell? He'd be lynched as a traitor.

With such weighty baggage in mind, New Yorker Films, a reputable smaller distributor, finally decided to take a gamble. Underground opened in June in Manhattan at the extremely out-of-the-way Anthology Film Archives. Surprise! The movie did sensationally, getting great reviews, from the Times to the Village Voice, and packing the houses. Now, it's Boston time.

Let me complain first. I don't savor Kusturica's Serbian nationalist politics. And the conclusion of the movie, in which he tries out some heavy-handed, condemn-both-sides, anti-war stuff, seems hypocritical and bogus. Underground is also 25 minutes too long -- it needs a trim of its incessant barroom celebrating.

Otherwise, it's a pretty sensational movie, Coppola-like hallucinatory, and everyone should see it.

The film begins with the Nazi air attack on Belgrade in 1941, an extraordinary sequence in which a city is turned to surrealist rubble. Kusturica's focus is on the Belgrade zoo, which has been reduced to stunned zebras and lost chimps and dead furry things. But our two liquor-breathed, unshaved protagonists hardly give a damn. Marko (Miki Manojlovic) has animalistic sex. In another setting, Blacky (Lazar Ristovski) shoves food into his belly as the bombs fall.

Joining the action, the two prove some kind of ruffian partisan joke. Backing Tito's Communist guerrillas, they're in the war far more for the money, the babes, the alcohol, the chance to be violent at will. On a typical great night out, they viciously destroy a pool hall. Then they go after the Nazis. In the real World War II, the Germans killed one out of three Belgraders during their siege. In Underground, the Nazis are buffoons modeled after the silly SSers in Lubitsch's classic black comedy To Be or Not To Be.

Our buddies are a nightmare Butch and Sundance. But when an injured Blacky is brought to a cellar hideout of Serb refugees to recover, Underground turns into The Sting. Marko concocts a remarkably devilish scheme: though the Nazis have been defeated, he persuades the cellar dwellers that the war continues, that they must remain out of sight. He will be their lookout against the Germans.

Why the plan? The underground gets converted into a munitions factory, with the results to be used against imagined Nazis. In fact, Marko sells the guns for personal gain, as the Titoists consolidate Yugoslavia. He keeps Blacky in the basement, so he can run around with Natalija (Mirjana Jokovic), Blacky's sexy, untrustworthy, actress girlfriend.

The years pass. Marko and Natalija become people's heroes under Communism. There are great scenes in which they are "gumped" (a coining of Voice critic J. Hoberman) into actual Titoist processionals -- they even hug the great leader in fervent Communist embrace. Blacky is thought dead; there are statues to his memory, and hilariously corny partisan films to celebrate his World War II heroics.

How to read the film? As in our own The Deer Hunter and Platoon, the images are cagy, startlingly ambiguous. Pacifists can condemn the protagonists as blind, idiotic killers. But war-mongers can also celebrate. Marko and Blacky may be perpetually drunk and womanizing and greedy, but for a time they're fabulously fearless warriors as well: prefigurements of rowdy, gutsy Serb nationalists cleansing Bosnia.