Foreign Films are Fun! Seriously!

This is the fourth of a bi-weekly feature on movies: "In Case You Missed It the First Time." This week, it's Emir Kusturica's 1995 film, Underground. Underground was released to great acclaim in '95 but has since passed into obscurity.

Long, dull, and bleak. For most decent, hard-working, red-blooded Americans, watching a foreign film is an experience not unlike going to church on a sunny day, or sitting through a root canal during the Fourth of July. After all, what's the use of the slow, subdued filmmaking of an Antonioni or a Tarkvosky when there's gas in the car, money in your pocket, and a new Adam Sandler movie at the theaters to blow your mind into oblivion?

At first glance, Emir Kusturica's "Underground" wouldn't seem to interest the majority of domestic moviegoers. Not only was "Underground" made in Eastern Europe -- not, we have been led to believe, the happiest place on Earth -- but it takes as its subject not one war, but three: a world, a cold, and a civil, to be precise. Most Americans would infer already that "Underground" is a cold, lifeless piece of agitprop complete with subtitles, black and white photography, and a downbeat ending where our heroes die instead of living happily ever after.

And they'd be right too if they weren't so wrong, because "Underground" is one of the wildest, funniest, most colorful films I've ever seen. There's enough lowbrow here to keep even the most puerile Sandler aficionado drooling and enough "high art" to appease the snobby cinephile too -- it won the Palm D'Or at Cannes, after all.

The story of two ludicrous, often drunk friends named Blacky and Marko, "Underground" follows the Yugoslavian natives from gun-runners in the German resistance movement during World War II to very different destinies during the Cold War and Serbian/Croatian conflict.

After fleeing from a Nazi prison, Blacky must hide in an underground basement with other wanted Slavs, while Marko guards their stronghold from above. Yet, when Yugoslavia is liberated and turns into a communist state, Marko neglects to tell Blacky and the others. As Marko rises through the ranks of communist Yugoslavia, Blacky remains in the dark, assembling weapons to fight the German occupiers who he still thinks move about above.

"Underground" is so much more than its synopsis lets on though. Anything but a simple cross between a history lesson and an allegory of the Yugoslavian plight, at times "Underground" resembles a Three Stooges episode at its most absurdly slapstick or a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta gone mad: Blacky and Marko smash bottles over their heads in drunken revelry as they explode like sugar-glass, a marching band follows the two characters throughout the movie adding an impromptu soundtrack, and an ape takes control of a tank and nearly wipes out a wedding party.

Yet for all its cartoonish qualities, "Underground" has a more serious core too, one that fortunately never becomes heavy-handed or pretentious. There's something sweet and na‹ve about the first trip of Blacky's son to the surface in his lifetime as he mistakes a deer for a horse and the moon for the sun, just as there's something overwhelmingly tragic in seeing the movie's tone shift from comic insouciance to grim reality in its third act.

"Underground" attempts to be everything at once -- a screwball comedy, a politically-minded farce, a tragic war movie -- and surprisingly succeeds on the strength of its own wild energy. Don't let the subtitles throw you, there's literally something here for everyone.