Emir Kusturica
Underground

"War is war when two brothers kill each other."

Talking about "Underground" by the Serbian Kusturica is an almost difficult undertaking: it is an immense film. Almost three hours long, crowning the forgotten story of a country with no more history, where registers, characters, and imaginations are mixed...

A work, awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995, both tragic and very colorful where Kusturica has the touch of lightness: like few others, he is able to recount the horror of war and the drama of death with exceptional comedic timing (yes, at some points it even makes you smile and laugh) and even where tears threaten (in the finale), "Underground" denies all pity and compassion, framing its characters with almost surrealist momentum.

Direction, writing, and cinematography are textbook: terribly evocative and artistic (someone, at the time, wrote that the choice of lighting could very well have been made by Francis Bacon), but incredibly functional to the story being told, incredibly without too many frills. Even the three hours (which pass all in one go: it's impossible to get bored unless watched inattentively) are necessary to show, know, and love this comédie humaine.

While in the background an invisible war (World War II) destroys houses, bodies, and memories, the characters (over-the-top, but never caricatural) live, unknowingly exploited, in an infernal limbo where they feel both at home and uncomfortable.  They live in an underground bunker until 1961, until, in 1992 they face a new battle. Some are born, others die. They love, hate, betray, marry, celebrate, get drunk...

The paradoxical and engaging journey of these souls is paced by a cheerful gypsy soundtrack (always diegetic, as Kusturica teaches) and, as the minutes pass, from the sensation of "grotesque vision," it quickly shifts to an unbearable humanity.

It's impossible not to mention at least a couple of textbook scenes: the most beautiful, in my opinion, is that of the extraordinary wedding with the "flying bride"; but there's also Natalia's wild and sensual dance on the irremediably phallic cannon, the meeting of the dead lovers underwater, the beautiful finale with lives adrift, the burning wheelchair spinning in circles... and they are not over.

Every scene drips with poetry, whispered despair, joy, fury, even tenderness. It makes you sigh, shocks, and engages with a lightness that not everyone possesses. Despite the surreal and grotesque feeling, it never risks parody: it is always balanced, yet violently expressive.

And beyond the reflection on a Yugoslavia that doesn't exist, on the regime and politics, there is also a lesson -perhaps pessimistic, perhaps not- human: "Life is a war. If you don't fight, you don't live, but if you do fight, you die."

A crucial work, indispensable in a cinephile's filmography. An auteur film, certainly,  but enjoyable and appreciable by all: it remains impressed and invites a second viewing.

And I wonder why, even though I wanted to see it for a long time, I've only just decided to do so now.

A final little curiosity: the child who, coming out of the underground for the first time in his life and discovers the world, is played by the porn actor from "A Serbian Film." And with that, I wrap it up.

Watch it, dammit!