He’s Back on the Sunny Side of the Street

In his new film “Black Cat, White Cat,” Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica made a serious decision: He wanted to lighten up. He felt that it was what he and his war-ravaged homeland needed most.

The film, which opened Friday in Los Angeles, is a picaresque fable of Eastern European Gypsies who have adapted to capitalism but still cling to some of the old ways. The characters are insanely outsize, with flashing gold teeth and bushy mustaches, and the imagery is deliriously kitschy, with souped-up wheelchairs and corpses on ice. It’s Balkanized Fellini.

“I wanted sunny movie to be taken as a therapy for the audience, antidepressive,” Kusturica, 43, says in his slightly broken but wonderfully evocative English. “I very much consciously wanted to make a film that would make people’s life better, easier. Because I think humanity is sick. All the units running around are living with a lack happiness, with a lack of direction, reaction to the beauty. This was my intention.”

(Kusturica won the Silver Lion award for direction for “Black Cat, White Cat” last year at the Venice International Film Festival, where this year he served as jury chairman.)

Like most people in the former Yugoslav federation, Kusturica was caught up in that region’s bitter and bloody religious and civil wars. His last movie was somber in tone and subject matter. But in person Kusturica doesn’t comes across as a suffering artist; he has longish, curly, rock-star hair, wears blue jeans and has the slightly blurred manner of someone who hasn’t had enough sleep.

Kusturica’s previous film, “Underground,” examined the last 50 years of Yugoslav history, including what Kusturica claims was Muslim complicity in the Nazi incarceration of Serbs in concentration camps. The movie won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1995 and also the enmity of Bosnian Muslims for its assertions regarding Muslim-Nazi collaboration. Kusturica was also vilified because he advocated cooperation with the Serbs instead of fighting them.

Because of these positions, Kusturica says, his apartment in Sarajevo was confiscated by the Bosnians--it went to a Muslim poet--as was the apartment of his parents. Authorities also accused his father of being a terrorist after a bomb was allegedly found by authorities in his possession. “It’s basically very political and very mean,” Kusturica says of those charges.

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The irony is that until “Underground” came out, Kusturica was a hero in his country. His first feature film, “Do You Remember Dolly Bell?,” won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1981. His second, “When Father Was Away on Business,” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1985. That was followed by “Time of the Gypsies,” which won him best director at Cannes in 1989. He even made the obligatory leap into American filmmaking with “Arizona Dream” (1993), a surreal road picture starring Johnny Depp, Jerry Lewis and Faye Dunaway that won a special jury prize in Berlin.

Then came “Underground,” which was savaged by Bosnians and foreign intellectuals, notably French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, who said that Kusturica was “a servile illustrator, flashy with criminal cliches” and accused him of being a Serbian propagandist.

Kusturica (pronounced KUS-tu-ree-tza) published a rebuttal to this and then vowed never to make a movie again.

“I was sincerely in deep depression,” he says. “A lot of things happened to me and my family with this nonsense with ‘Underground,’ which was clearly a film against totalitarianism, against manipulation, against lies, against people who were governing the country that I was born in and that I lived in. I was accused of doing exactly against what I was [trying to say] in my film.”

Kusturica changed direction completely with “Black Cat, White Cat,” which is not to say that the new film is completely free of political content. Kusturica says the film’s Gypsy gangsters are stand-ins for ex-Communist officials who are still in power because they’ve been able to adapt their thuggery from one political system to another. In this as in many other things, Kusturica takes the long view. People are culturally predisposed to act the way they do, and it takes generations for them to change.

“They are murderers, they are awful people,” he says of the ex-Communists. “But in the future their kids will be studying in Oxford, Cambridge, and they will be thinking how awful and how terrible when people kill each other, whatever their parents did. It’s the nature of the transformation of society.”

Kusturica says he’s not endeared himself to many in Yugoslavia with his views of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who held the country together for so many years. He says that those who long for the old days when Serbs and Muslims weren’t at one another’s throats forget--or choose to forget--that this harmony was achieved through repression. The secret police were everywhere, he recalls, noting that it was even illegal to sing in bars, for fear that ethnic anthems would be sung and passions aroused.

According to Kusturica, Tito was smart enough to create the illusion of freedom--for example, there was a film festival in Croatia--but he retained the right to determine which film won. (Tito was partial to cowboy movies.)

On these and other matters, Kusturica is expansive, though he’s a little vague about himself. When asked what his ethnic origins are, he says, “My heritage, my mother’s language is Serb, or it used to be called Serbo-Croatian.” On the other hand, his name, Emir, is Muslim, which helps explain the sense of betrayal on the part of Bosnian Muslims.

Kusturica was born in Sarajevo in 1955 and attended film school in Prague. He returned to work at Sarajevo Television and made a TV film called “The Brides Are Coming,” which was banned because of its sexual content. His feature films were all made after Tito’s death in 1980, in that narrow window before the country was torn apart, and he spent a couple of years in New York teaching film at Columbia University.

Declaring himself rootless, he now lives in France with his wife and daughter. He has a son who’s a rock drummer in Belgrade. He visits his mother in Montenegro (which together with Serbia makes up the current Yugoslavia), though he no longer has contact with friends or family in Sarajevo.

Kusturica may be physically removed from Yugoslavia, but “Black Cat, White Cat” revisits the region and is suffused with its violently emotional sensibility. The film originally was intended to be about a Gypsy wedding band that appeared in “Underground,” but after 10 days of script writing the wedding became the end rather than the beginning. Instead, most of the story was devoted to the characters who attend it and how they got there.

Because of bad weather, shooting was interrupted for almost a year, which was fine by Kusturica, who needed the rest. To say the least, Kusturica takes the filmmaking process to heart--in fact, he takes everything to heart. “My problem with making movies is that each time I exhaust myself,” he says. “Each time I stop my films at least twice in order to be able to radiate this amount of energy all the time. So after three months, it’s like I think I go to the mental hospital.

“I make movies like some people in the past were doing handmade watches. I don’t see it as basically [how] 95% of cinema is made today. Each frame I want to make as a premiere. I want things like people made 50 years ago.”