UNDERGROUND (48)

Directed by: Emir Kusturica

Starring: Miki Manojlovic, Lazar Ristovski

The Pitch: An allegory of Yugoslavia: a WW2 Resistance fighter turned Communist party boss exploits his old Resistance buddies, still hiding in a cellar unaware that the war is over, through forty years of history and their country's final descent into civil war.

Theo Sez: In a sense this dwarfs every other film this year (maybe any year) - a requiem to a country from its own people, a jagged tour through the history and final destruction of modern Yugoslavia. In another, unfortunately more basic sense it's just a mess, and a major disappointment. Kusturica is a unique film-maker, one who loves life instead of other movies or the bottom line but - unlike most similarly admirable arthouse heroes - loves it robustly, with a mad passion that transforms and elevates it into folk poetry. His films are exhilarating because they not only celebrate the quotidian - small, disappointed lives, people who are "losers" - but do so with unabashed pyrotechnics. Larger-than-life with a melancholy heart, he seems the ideal choice for the story of a doomed, crazy country, and indeed the film is extravagantly daring, blending extended comic set-pieces with historical footage, broad slapstick with a sly metaphor for the mendacity of Communism. Yet - perhaps because it's a pageant, with heavily symbolic characters - it all seems very stilted, a curiously hollow film full of empty sound and fury. The director's humanism seems to have deserted him - there's no life to these ill-defined, archetypal characters, nothing underlying the style - and his sense of rhythm undoubtedly has: the film is scrappy, overlong, poorly-edited, disjointed and cacophonous. By the end it nonetheless finds a certain grandeur, as the sheer scale of its ambitions becomes apparent; but getting there is hard work.