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The first spadeful uncovers broken liquor bottles, used condoms, cigarette butts and a tuba. The next unearths a charred human skeleton entwined with that of a chimp. Eventually, the shovel scrapes against a large, ornate chest teeming with crumbling riches and artifacts from a departed land, a now-imaginary country entombed to memory by the clumsy hands of demagogues and the unsentimental convulsions of history. So goes the rowdy allegorical dig of Emir Kusturica's electric elegy, Underground. The film opens in the former Yugoslavia, circa 1941, with a pillaging charge of oompahing horns. Gunshots, lusty whoops and the elephantine toots of a mad brass band are the bluff soundtrack for two besotted thieves on a midnight pilgrimage to a Belgrade whorehouse, celebrating their induction into the Communist Party with their own maniacal, roving party. Blacky (the Kevin Kline-ish Lazar Ristovski) is the type of man who breaks the seal of a bottle of slivovitz and throws away the cap. His best friend Marko (Miki Manojlovic) boasts a more refined brio glossed with the ability to spin beautiful lies. World War II unfurls like a Keystone Cops movie directed by Richard Lester. During Belgrade's Nazi occupation, Blacky and Marko--nouveau riche from gun-running--find time to vie for the affections of a lovely overactress named Natalija (Mirjana Jokovic), the kept woman of a bumbling German officer. Blacky's onstage abduction of Natalija ushers in the nimble collusions between fact and fiction to come. As the cartoon-sexy Natalija performs before a rapt German audience--her Nazi sugar daddy Franz front-row center--Blacky splices himself into the play, ties Natalija to his back, then breaks character by shooting Franz before making a madcap escape. "The two of you could make one good man!" Natalija squeals to Blacky and Marko as they spin about like three spokes in a wobbly bicycle tire, crooning the mournful lyrics to a lively jig in weary celebration. Before you know it, it's the '60s and Marko is Comrade Tito's right-hand man (with scenes given surreal authenticity by the expert "gumping" of characters against historic footage). In commemoration of fallen comrade Blacky, Marko unveils statues, spins heroic yarns and sells the stories to movie producers. But while Blacky may be 6 feet underground, he is very much alive--as are dozens of comrades (including an industrious chimpanzee) toiling in Marko's cellar making arms for a war they believe is still waging. Marko and Natalija are kinky co-conspirators in this elaborate puppet show, where recorded air-raid sirens and scripted dramas complement a sooty, Terry Gilliam world of painstaking artifice. The manic energy is goosed when battle-hungry Blacky emerges from his subterranean farce onto another fabricated mind-fuck: a movie set crawling with make-believe fascists preparing for battle. Kusturica's frantic wedding party transforms into a sobering wake when Marko and Blacky evolve into gangsters fueling opposing sides of the Serbo-Croatian civil wars during the film's last act. The profound pain of men clawing their way out of ideological darkness to find that their country no longer exists is compounded by the insight that the nature of war lies not in actual fighting, but in a brutally eternal, all-too-human disposition. It's like sucking on a lollipop for nearly three hours only to arrive at a strychnine center. Maligned by the Parisian press as being more hysterical than historical, Underground is most powerful as a host of stinging metaphoric images. Helpless animals are killed when a zoo is pummeled by bombs. Terrified by the sounds of strafing planes, the surviving animals turn on one another while others escape through the rubble to roam the streets in lumbering shock. By casting frightened beasts, Kusturica creates an instant microcosm of war that is--somewhat shamefully--more affecting than the sight of human slaughter. The winding, interconnecting puzzle of the cellar serves as a symbolic model of the Soviet Bloc. And when a happy, fantastical piece of land abounding with rejoicing phantoms breaks free and floats off into the mist, a narrator tells us that Yugoslavia will be remembered "in pain, sorrow and joy." Even seemingly random blasts of absurdity are packed with meaning. In drunken revelry, Marko sticks a long-stemmed rose in the ample ass of a whore bathing away the remnants of her last shift. Degraded yet exalted, sordid yet pristine, the image is emblematic of the film and the country it mourns, with beauty sprouting from the most unlikely of places. |
