Underground

Today is 15 October. Tonight's second film is the reverse of the first.

In Landscape in the Mist a lie sends two children onto the road; in Underground a lie keeps a whole group locked in a cellar.

On 6 April 1941 German bombs fall on Belgrade. Marko hides his best friend Crni's wife, his brother Ivan and a crowd of others in the cellar of his grandfather's house — meant to be temporary. The war ends and he does not tell them. For the next twenty years he serves as a high official beside Tito, gives speeches, stands on parade, and quietly ships the weapons made in that cellar out of the country by the truckload. To stop the people below from counting the years, he even steals hours from their clock, so that they believe the Second World War has been running for fifteen years rather than twenty.

This is a film about how long a person can stay asleep — and about how much someone else can make from keeping him that way.

On this list it fills in Yugoslavia, the Balkans having been entirely absent, and it fills in the 1990s, which held only two films (Close-Up, 1990; A Brighter Summer Day, 1991). It also answers a standing gap in genre: the archive had no black comedy, and Cannes handed this one the Palme d'Or in 1995 — Kusturica's second, after When Father Was Away on Business (1985).

There is one more counterpoint: the children in Landscape in the Mist walk north toward Germany, the centre of Europe; the country in Underground is disappearing from the map. Both films are shot at Europe's edge — one about departure, one about disintegration.

1941 年 4 月 6 日清晨，贝尔格莱德。两个游手好闲的好朋友——电工 Crni 和投机分子 Marko——在德军轰炸的警报声里往家赶。

轰炸过后，Marko 把 Crni 临产的妻子、自己的弟弟 Ivan 和一群人藏进祖父家的地窖，说是暂时避一避。Crni 的妻子生下儿子 Jovan 后死去。

Ivan 是动物园管理员。轰炸那天，他从园里只救出一只小黑猩猩，叫 Soni，从此一直带着它。

战争结束了。地窖的门没有打开。

（这里不再往下说。）

Half a century inside one cellar

1995. An international co-production from Yugoslavia (Serbia), Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany and Hungary. 170 minutes, in Serbian and German. Directed by Emir Kusturica, co-written with Dušan Kovačević.

The film falls into three parts named for Yugoslavia's three eras — "War" (1941–1944), "Cold War" (1961), "War" (1992). In 1941 German troops occupy Belgrade; by 1961 Marko is a high official beside Tito; by 1992 the Yugoslav Wars have begun. One country, three dates, three wars, and Kusturica films them as one unbroken brass-band carnival.

It is a comedy and it is a lament

Every scene is loud: the band, the drinking, the weddings, the animals escaped from the zoo, the rows of rifles. Writing from Cannes in 1995, Variety's Deborah Young called it "a steamroller circus that leaves the viewer dazed and exhausted, but mightily impressed", adding that "if Fellini had shot a war movie, it might resemble Underground".

But Janet Maslin in The New York Times located the film's real heart: its most devastating idea is the morning after — a man emerges from a subterranean hiding place after decades in the grip of a political delusion and is told that there is no Yugoslavia any more.

The last shot

The ending is a dreamlike reunion. The dead gather for a dinner on a small peninsula to celebrate Jovan's wedding. Ivan speaks the closing words: they will pass on to their children fairy tales that begin, "Once upon a time, there was a country." Then the ground separates from the peninsula, becomes an island, and drifts away with them still on it.

What it set off

The year it took the Palme d'Or, Underground also detonated one of the fiercest arguments in European intellectual life. The Yugoslav journalist Stanko Cerović publicly accused Kusturica of Serbian propaganda in June 1995; the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut attacked the film in Libération without having seen it; Bernard-Henri Lévy called Kusturica "a racist genius in the mold of Louis-Ferdinand Céline". Others defended it: writing in Sight & Sound in 1996, the British author Misha Glenny attacked critics who could read the film only through a simplistic pro- or anti-Serb lens.

Notably, Cerović, who fired first, changed his mind in 2012: it was not propaganda, he said, and "it's quite possible that Underground will age well".

The controversy itself proves the point: a film that turns a country's self-deception into comedy is not one everybody leaves laughing.