A good movie

I already saw this movie but, since it was a while back, I was quite eager to check it out again. First of all, in the 90's, Kusturica was one of the most important directors in the world and I was a big fan of his work. Unfortunately, we haven't heard much from him since the beginning of the 00's and that's really too bad. Coming back to our main feature, well, I have to admit that I didn’t remember a single thing about the damned thing when I was rewatching it which wasn’t a really good sign, to be honest. I mean, I did like this flick, Kusturica has a very distinct and interesting directing style but, somehow, I had a rather hard time to connect with this feature. In my opinion, the whole thing was basically some kind of dark feverish drunken nightmare which was at the same time quite mesmerizing but also rather alienating to behold. Later on, Kusturica would also make ‘Crna macka, beli macor’ and I enjoyed it more because, even though it displayed a similar chaos and hysteria, the tone was just much lighter and even sometimes downright hilarious. In this case, you didn’t get a romanticized depiction of the Gypsies. I mean, there was in fact some romance involved but most of it turned out to be rather dark and bleak. At least, there was another killer soundtrack by the great Goran Bregović which reinforced even more the magic realism displayed in this movie. 5 years later, Kusturica would make his only US production so far, ‘Arizona Dream’, starring no one less than Johnny Depp, and the damned thing turned out to be quite marvelous, by far my favorite movie from this director. Anyway, to conclude, even though it didn’t completely blow me away, it was still a very good drama and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Emir Kusturica’s work.


7/10