DEREK MALCOLM meets Emir Kusturica, the Bosnian director, whose film Underground opens in SA this week
HE looks like a veteran rock star, tall and handsome if slightly dishevelled from too much touring. But Emir Kusturica, who hails from Sarajevo, is a film-maker without a rock star’s vanity. He speaks quietly and with conviction off the set and lives equally quietly in a small village in Normandy.
He is one of the most extraordinary European directors of the past 20 years, and his films accord with his physical image. They are giant, restless and Gothic, with flights of the imagination set side by side with a kind of hyper-realism. Though only 40, Kusturica has won the Palme d’Or at Cannes twice – in 1995 with Underground, a three-hour epic commenting on 50 years of Yugoslav history, and in 1984 for When Father Was Away on Business, which depicted the national betrayals of the Fifties from the perspective of a small questioning boy. In fact, every feature film he has made has won a substantial prize at one or other of the three major European festivals – a record second to none.
Then, there is Arizona Dream, the film that enticed him to America. That won Berlin’s Special Jury Prize in 1993. It’s the story of a young dreamer (Johnny Depp) who returns to his home town in Arizona after working on a fish counter in New York. The movie is the weirdest view of The American Dream ever put on film.
Kusturica has been called the Yugoslav Fellini, Sarajevo’s answer to Ken Russell, and the Balkan magic realist. He makes huge movies in which everything bar the kitchen sink is thrown in, with his imagination frequently at odds with his budgets.
His art springs as much from the films of his own country (notably the work of Dusan Makavejev) as from anywhere else, though he was a graduate of the Famu school at Prague. But no one was quite as daredevil as Kusturica, who plunges headlong into his projects, emerging from them totally exhausted by the experience.
Arizona Dream is occasionally brilliant and even poetic, often fantastical and sometimes just plain silly. All his films have been marathons; all of them, he says, have ”nearly killed me”. He admits that the problems are often down to him and his unrelenting imagination.
Both Arizona Dream and Underground suggest Alice In Wonderland rewritten by Franz Kafka. Underground, a black farce-cum-fantasy, attempts to summon up the complex, often contrary Balkan character, through the agency of a war profiteer and arms manufacturer who locks up his workers in an underground cavern to foil the Nazi invaders and doesn’t tell them when the war is ended. When they eventually come up for air, it’s another time and another war, with United Nations soldiers looking on helplessly. The saga spans half a century of history ”without a single character learning a meaningful lesson”.
Although many people in Sarajevo want Kusturica to take sides, he steadfastly refuses to do so. Everyone, he says, is ”behaving like shit. I don’t have any political illusions. Yugoslavia was as much a metaphor for human stupidity and greed as a country, and so is Underground.”
Well, the West has not found his desire not to take sides a problem, eagerly pinning the bulk of the blame on Serbian aggression. Kusturica has no time for such a simplistic viewpoint.
”If there’s any guilt to be put on someone for the present situation, it has to be on Tito, who created a system with no values in which nationalities were not free and there was no true democracy. He was given huge power and a lot of money from the West to lean neither to the East nor the West but to be a kind of independent buffer zone. When he died, what was left was a nation with bitter memories and a hundred ethnic tensions.”
So why is there a scene in Underground showing western dignitaries weeping at Tito’s funeral? He says that they are not so much crocodile tears as tears of ignorance.
The international heads of state still held him up as a good, just man. ”Perhaps they didn’t know what he’d done. But more likely they didn’t care. No one cares about us until we risk sending the whole region up in flames. Then they send the United Nations in and we have to pay the soldiers most of what remains of our money if we want to get out. The situation is so ludicrous it makes the plot of a very bad film. I hope mine is not.”
Depressing stuff. But Kusturica is not a pessimist by nature, hence the optimistic ending of Underground, hinting at a reunited Yugoslavia. ”That’s because I am either an optimist or a fool. Probably both. You have to believe in a ray of hope somewhere. You have to give the audience something to hang on to even if it isn’t, like Hollywood wants, something neat and convenient.”
Kusturica calls Underground ”a Hieronymus Bosch movie”, says he’s gone as far as he can do with Gothic extravagance, and is ready to embark on a new, back-to-basics stage of his career.
”My next film will have no more than two or three people, a hand-held camera and a crew that won’t be more than 20. I swear it. With both Arizona Dream and Underground, I thought I was going to die at least twice. It’s too much of a strain. I want, like my country, to survive. Why should I fight a war to make a film?”
Underground opens on the South African art circuit this Friday, April 11