CULTURE |
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14 March 2005
There is a scene in director Emir Kusturica’s new film, Life is a Miracle, where a cat jumps from a shed onto an unsuspecting pigeon. It is a metaphor for how innocents are easy victims for the beasts who foster war. This theme runs throughout the film; an entertaining sprawl of a movie about a Serb and a Muslim who fall in love in the early days of the Bosnian conflict in 1992.
Luka, a Serbian train engineer from Belgrade, lives with his mad ex-diva wife and footballer son in a mountain village near the Serbian border. While Luka slowly repairs the town’s railroad, bears take over peoples’ homes, his wife sings opera with a transistor radio, and the mayor’s corrupt assistant vies for power – all with a mad passion. Only the television set speaks of the escalating violence in Sarajevo.
The war begins and Luka’s wife runs away with a shady Hungarian musician, while his son Miloz is taken prisoner. The Serbian nationals capture a young Muslim beauty, Sabaha, in hopes of exchanging her for Miloz, and make Luka watch over her. The two fall in love and a story reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet unfolds as Luka and Sabaha navigate the conflict.
What makes Kusturica a brilliant filmmaker is his ability to pull off grand scenes of operatic chaos, as well as specific moments that convey life’s surreal absurdity. Miracle contains many signature Kustirica scenes: a cat that aggressively bites food out of the hands of humans; the Mayor’s wife who likes her buttocks pummelled with boxing gloves; a thug who pees through a long tube onto a football goalie, resulting in a stadium-wide brawl.
The frenzied horn bands, the fights, the drinking, the shooting guns, the hilarity and sadness that are pervasive in his two previous films, Black Cat, White Cat and Underground, are again found in Miracle. In the earlier films these elements denoted Kusturica’s style; by this third film they are becoming his personal clichés.
Editing is another area where Kusturica falters. At 154 minutes, he should have cut some of the exhausting small town anarchy that prevails during the first hour.
For Miracle, Kusturica trades the political posturing found in Underground for a romantic story of those caught off guard by politics. Luka, his lover, his family, even the soldiers in the film are pigeons, not cats. A decade after the Bosnian conflict Kusturica is still addressing the war, but this time he seeks to expose the humanity of the conflict and entertain rather than be a polemicist. With the beautiful cinematography, the excellent lead roles, and the overall compassion of Life is a Miracle, the director succeeds.
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