Underground (1995)

If Fellini had shot a war movie, it might resemble “Underground.” Emir Kusturica’s epic black comedy about Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1992 is a three-hour steamroller circus that leaves the viewer dazed and exhausted, but mightily impressed. Its energy, coupled with its ringing (if simplistic) condemnation of the years of communism and the current war, make it one of the most emotionally engaging and exhilarating films at Cannes.

Emir Kusturica establishes the freewheeling tone of Underground from its opening seconds, with the film roaring into life on the boisterous din of a brass band that doesn’t so much march through Belgrade’s streets as it sprints through them while blaring its music in an accelerated triple-time whirl.

The band plays at the behest of Marko (Miki Manojlović), who celebrates his friend, Blacky (Lazar Ristovski), joining the communist party. The next morning, Nazis invade Yugoslavia, bombs falling on Belgrade as Marko has sex with a prostitute and Blacky eats breakfast, only acknowledging the German invasion through irritated mutterings, as if the Luftwaffe flying overhead were merely loud upstairs neighbors. A nearby zoo monitored by Marko’s brother, Ivan (Slavko Štimac), is destroyed, leaving most animals dead and Ivan sobbing as he catatonically cradles a young chimpanzee.

The manic intensity of this opening stretch prefigures a film that maintains its sense of sweeping, grandiose farce even as the action narrows around a basement hideout that Marko sets up in his grandfather’s house and uses to shelter family and friends from the Nazis. Yet this ostensible altruism turns to exploitation when the war comes to a close and Marko, seeing opportunities for financial gain and power over others, keeps his loved ones, including Blacky, in the literal dark, staging an illusion of a never-ending war and keeping them locked underground for their “safety.” Afer Josip Tito takes power, Marko establishes himself as a key figure in the communist government thanks to the number of weapons he can supply the regime—weapons built by the people in his basement who assume they’re crafting them for the resistance. As generations are born and come of age underground, the hideout gradually turns into its own kind of makeshift hamlet. It takes on the properties of a demented Plato’s cave, where the illusion of a still-existent Nazi occupation keeps people fervently hoping for the communist rule they have no idea is actually in place.

Kusturica paints a caustic portrait of his homeland in a constant state of flux, always subservient to whatever strongman happens to be in charge at the moment. Archival footage shows invading Nazis receiving a warm welcome in cities like Zagreb, while the iron-fisted rule of Tito hangs over the film’s middle section. Various characters embody the oscillating loyalties of the easily duped, none more visibly or comically than Marko’s lover, Natalija (Mirjana Joković), a two-bit actress who’s giving performances in German before the Nazis have even settled in Yugoslavia and responds to the murder of her Wehrmacht lover by instantly switching sides to Marko’s partisans. Marko himself represents the internal forces who exploit the constant political upheaval to their own material gain, further repressing his beleaguered countrymen.

Kusturica’s film is a randy peepshow, a thorny docu-tangle of real-life horror and magical realist wish fulfillments. It explains how a country destroyed itself from the inside, and it exists to show us how not to repeat these mistakes. The people (and animals) in Kusturica’s requiem are perpetually restless—there’s an idea here that if they stop moving, they would cease to exist. Underground’s final images are some of the finest ever committed to film. In death, Marko and Blacky are reunited one more time and their block party breaks off from the rest of the world. “There is no war until a brother kills a brother.” That’s Yugoslavia’s political and philosophical conundrum in a nutshell, but Kusturica intends his humanist masterwork as a time capsule for all nations. When does the party end and war begin? It doesn’t have to

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/underground/