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IT'S BEEN TWEI,VE years since a film by Emir Kusturica has had any kind of extended legitimate release in the U.S. the last was When Father Was Away on Business (85), a Palme d'Or-winning arthouse success. So perhaps Kusturica's disappearance from what Americans perceive as the map of world cinema is not so surprising. Certainly, one could partially attribute the director's anonymity these days to his taste for excess, one that results in movies that are at once brilliant and maddening.
Take the dislocated hodgepodge of sequences comprising the sporadically entrancing Arizona Dream - filmed in 1992, but released here in 1995 Kusturica's one shot at working in the States with known actors, including Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway, Jerry Lewis, and Lili Taylor. Or consider his second Palme d'Or victory, Underground (95), an absurdist, ferociously ambitious, and decidedly overlong look at the vicissitudes of war, which has waited two years to find U.S. distribution. Perhaps Kusturica's stubborn, virtuostic blend of black humor and abject tragedy has helped make him seem inaccessible to U.S. audiences, who appear increasingly intolerant of foreign films that challenge the niceties of coherent form and content.
But it's more tempting and resonant to see Kusturica's situation as parallel to that of his beloved native land, the former Yugoslavia: uprooted, conflicted, and threatened with being forgotten. His debut feature, Do You Remember Dolly Bell?, which won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1981 when Kusturica was just 26, is a teen love story set in the Sixties in his hometown of Sarajevo, yet it's as much a romance about place as about people. When Father Was Away on Business, an "historical love film" set in 1950, continues Kusturica's evident affection for Sarajevo, with piquant vignettes of children's games, folksongs, excessive drinking, and boisterous family squabbles, despite the film's darker story of a cheating patriarch banished from home for his communist associations.
Kusturica distilled his brand of magical whimsy and frank realism further in Time of the Gypsies (89), which follows an impressionable teenage boy from his gypsy town in Yugoslavia into a hardened life of petty crime in Italy. Commissioned by David Puttnam during his brief heyday as head of Columbia Pictures, the movie, Kusturica's most sustained and beguiling next to When...