"Underground" - Film Review

[saavedra77]

Underground (1995, Yugoslavia) is a dark historical satire, allegorizing over fifty years of Balkan--especially Serb--history as a tale of opportunism, manipulation, and betrayal.  Director Emir Kustunica dramatizes how the political isolation of Titoist Yugoslavia enabled profiteers and propagandists to chain the public to the past, blind them to change, set them against one another, and entrap rising generations in a world of destructive mythology.  Kusturica's Yugoslavia becomes an underground, sometimes underwater world where the rule of lies makes day indistinguishable from night and blurs the passage of time.  Its people spend the Cold War reliving the mythology of nation's founding, the World War Two partisan struggle: "Tito! Tito! Tito!/Everyone sang the same song/and believed that outside/the fascists of World War Two were still in power," as Kusturica puts it.  When the Berlin Wall falls, the peoples of Yugoslavia resort to fratricide, telling themselves that they were now, really, fighting their World War Two enemies again: "Chetniks," "Ustashas," etc.  Finally, after the horrors of 1991-1995, all that remain for them are Fellini-esque fantasies of folkway, the family, fruition--fantasies that seem less likely to heal than to accelerate the country's disintegration.