One of my favourite movies of all times! Best Yugoslav movie ever!
Kusturica became legend with it and there is a reason why!Everything is done perfectly and there was no surprise when it won 1985 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) and the FIPRESCI Prize... I am still not sure why was nominated for the
1985 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film but it did not win it... politics, maybe?
Set in post-World War II Yugoslavia during the Informbiro period, the film tells the story through the eyes of a young boy Malik. His father Mesa (played by Miki Manojlović) has been suspected of working for Cominform and sent to a labor camp after a careless remark about a political newspaper cartoon.
The movie opens in June 1950 with a local's serenading field workers. He sings Mexican songs because it's "safer", and children climb trees and play around. The story is from the perspective of the boy, Malik, whose mother Sena tells him that his father is on a business trip. Malik is a chronic sleepwalker.
After a while, Mea's wife and children rejoin him in Zvornik. Malik meets Maa, the daughter of a Russian doctor. He falls in love with her, but last sees her when the ambulance takes her away.
At the wedding of his maternal uncle Zijah, Malik witnesses his father's affair with a woman pilot. She later tries to commit suicide by using a toilet's flush cord. Sena reconciles with her brother Zijah, who's been diagnosed with diabetes.
Read that again... crazy story becomes real life, and real life becomes crazy story, and everything is so smoothly run by the Master himself: Emir Kusturica!
December 8, 2007
