by Carlos Garza

What is it about Balkan wedding music?

Ears not attuned to its haunting arabesque of sound will find the unrelenting layers of wind instruments as airy as filo-dough or as cloying as a hefty piece of baklava. The subtlety of gypsy song lies in that inimitable merging of joy and despair, rendering celebration and lament as different tremolos on the same fluttery chord. In Emir Kusturica's astonishing Serbian-produced film Underground (1995), composer Goran Bregovic fuses the cockiness of Yugoslav brass bands with whimsical, decidedly Hungarian undertones, adding some bass and tightening up the arrangements along the way to produce an intoxicating, gorgeous hybrid. Unlike most attempts at westernizing eastern music, Bregovic in no way compromises the power of the originals.

That same approach applies to the film as a whole, catering to all manner of human impulses and follies -- except Western notions of what this war film should be. Financed in part by the French behemoth CIBY 2000 and Serbian television (closely tied to Milosevic's regime), Underground reared its impish little head right smack in the middle of the Bosnian war: a ten-hour-plus miniseries trimmed down to three hours for Cannes and awarded the Palme d'Or, well before the Dayton accords. At its helm is an internationally renowned Bosnian Moslem director accused of vocally backing Serb nationalists (Kusturica, incidentally, refuses to take a clear political position in his film). One could hardly expect a warm reception.

At a moment when only the standard dead baby/grieving mother fodder could have appropriately startled its viewers into their two-hours' worth of social conscience, Kusturica's gorgeous assault on the senses plunged them into a considerably longer fever dream. The film is all the more disturbing for daring to be extravagantly vaudevillian and more than a little sexy. As is often the case, timing considerably hindered objective appraisal of a complex, visionary work of art that demands multiple viewings. In any case, it arouses anything but objectivity, regardless of its political content.

During the German occupation of Serbia, best friends Marko and Blacky team up to go whoring, engage in all sorts of criminal activity, and kick some Nazi butt. Blacky loves the actress Natalja. Marko has taken an interest in her himself. Natalja loves men, including the incorrigible Franz, for whom she is all too willing to stab her former lover in the back. Unfazed, Blacky ties her up and whips up a lively impromptu wedding ceremony, during which Marko makes his first attempts to vie for her affections. So that he may have her all to himself, Marko convinces a newly incapacitated Blacky (due to a bomb explosion), together with his band of resistance fighters and family members hiding out in his grandfather's basement, that World War II is still raging up until the 1970s. He concocts all sorts of nifty contraptions, parlor tricks, and acrobatic play-acting so that he can keep the community working 'round-the-clock, fabricating arms to be sold on the black market while he and Natalja rise to power under Tito's regime. Yes, all for love.

Of course, in Underground, love is just another natural disaster. Marko refers to it as the reason he embarks on his grand deception and, in his own twisted way, he may actually not be far from the truth. I know I'm indulging in the most typical form of condescension on the part of an imperialist nation with regard to its subject countries, but damn it, after this film, how can I not see the Balkan peoples as vessels of primal instincts and raw emotions?

We can at least wonder about the three principal actors; punctuated by the insolent, luscious brass, their every gesture seems to convey a barely restrained, erotically charged yet often rapacious life force, channeled into Blacky's superhuman feats and endurance, Marco's hypnotic, elegantly burlesque movement, and Natalija's hysterical grace and flighty precision masking a whirlwind of seething rage and resentment. And she looks so good straddling the barrel of a tank. I can't imagine a single American actor in such an intensely physical yet variegated performance. Perhaps the trio can even be said to embody a myth the West has never quite come to terms with: the creative and destructive impulse drawn from a common source.

Not that I want to sound too condescendingly anthropological; the myth cannot but ring true considering our exceedingly hygienic bombing campaign on the heels of certainly the most ridiculous, superfluous, costly, and -- what is truly unforgivable -- thoroughly unsexy political sex scandal in history. While American housewives curled up in bed with Monica's Story, thousands of Serbs undoubtedly made passionate love before being blown to smithereens in the exhilarating doomsday atmosphere.

My reveries are some of the more benign forms of mystification in comparison with the field-day the Western press has enjoyed regarding the former Yugoslavia for the past decade or so. Few cared to delve into the hair-brained rumor that there may have been actual economic factors involved in the Bosnian war, not the least of which includes the consequences of the privatization bonanza after the fall of the Iron Curtain. "Young reformers" and Swiss bank accounts? Starting to sound familiar?

Let us not forget our penchant for furthering the political careers of known criminals in foreign countries. After all, Milosevic wouldn't have gotten where he is in the first place without U.S. support. No need to elaborate on how his crimes seem rather tame for Balkan standards (or how every spineless Western journalist covered up those lulls in inspiration with a fresh bout of officially-condoned Hitler-mongering, thereby cheapening the unique legacy of WWII). The recent NATO campaign shows, if it wasn't already abundantly clear, that the region continues to be a mere playing field for imperialist powers exploiting deep-seated ethnic tensions in the wake of new political alliances so as to intervene and carve up the territories to their advantage.

But then this is hardly news. The interesting thing is that during both Bosnia and Kosovo, as the violence began to spin out of control, we were expected to believe either that Serbia was the new evil empire or that pent-up ethnic tensions could just all of a sudden explode organically. For many, the history of strife in the Balkans made the massacres a periodic, inevitable, utterly baffling event -- a natural disaster which could only be partially elucidated by thorough familiarity with centuries of battles, voluntary and involuntary movements of people, and overlapping of territorial boundaries and ethnic populations.

Here's where Kusturica pulls his most wicked sleight of hand by actually embracing the deterministic view of war, even comparing it to an earthquake in the now-infamous press release, a verbal counterpart to the last scene in Underground. Yet while the West used the idea to exonerate itself from responsibility, Kusturica milks the cyclical view of history for all its lyrical juice, emerging with a sad, hilarious, intensely personal, truly moving portrait of what was lost. He conveys the compassion of any great artist for even his most despicable creations -- for characters painted with such bold strokes that they would have engendered mere caricatures in any other film. And he respects his viewers enough not to expound on the comfortable premise of the inherent impossibility of uniting such ethnically diverse countries. It's no big secret that Tito's regime did remarkably little to really unite the different ethnic groups in Yugoslavia. Like any dictator, he seemed to give no thought to what would happen after his death. But the fact remains that on some level it all worked, and for a long time. In comparison with what was to come, it's hardly surprising that Kusturica makes no attempt to hide his nostalgia for the period even as he savagely lambastes it.

Yet while the point is not to provide any answers, or any real culprits, the film doesn't let Western Europe and the U.S. off the hook easily. In the closing Bosnian segment, three things are made abundantly clear: 1) as in all wars, someone clearly stands to profit; 2) fascism on a grand scale can come back fiendishly disguised; and 3) Europe remains deeply connected in ways no one can fully understand.

Peeved that there was no place in the film to reconfirm their image of themselves as enlightened saviors striving to contain the plague of ethnic strife that civilized Europe had long since eradicated, a legion of whiny Euro-fags inevitably reduced Underground to mere Serb propaganda and, in a bizarre transference of values, attacked the director for his hyper-baroque style. Such subtleties were lost on French audiences, who ignored the film anyway and made it one of the biggest bombs of the year. In Bosnia, however, resentment was so great among Kusturica's countrymen (many of whom had not even seen the film) that he has not returned since for fear of his life.

Interestingly enough it is the very mechanics of propaganda, rather than any assignment of blame, that interests him the most. The film's central metaphor -- of a nation locked in a comfortable cellar of eternal mobilization -- relies on a scathing, yet nuanced, satire. For every nod to the inherent cheesiness of the methods, Kusturica acknowledges the essential seductiveness of propaganda and the power of the charade (and this is where Underground attains its most perversely brilliant moments) even when you're in on the joke.

What symbol of beauty and purity could be more conventional than a bride? Yet in Kusturica's hands, the wedding emerges not only as the most visually stunning and poetically moving episode, but the very centerpiece of Underground: a concise, eloquent, visual statement on the relation between art and politics. Kusturica establishes an aesthetic continuity that reaches out beyond the borders of the screen, inviting us to question our role as spectators by placing us as the mirror image of the wedding guests. Like them, we are mystified by an orchestrated spectacle and lose sight of its underlying mechanisms.

As Marko points out, "Art is only an enormous lie." But the analogy doesn't stop there. To complete the mirror image, we must also recognize ourselves as victims of a much greater deception; the art of politics has always consisted of keeping us underground. And Kusturica doesn't fail to point out that perhaps we are better off to stay there.