Black & white

Emir Kusturica gets off-color

by Chris Fujiwara

BLACK CAT, WHITE CAT. Directed by Emir Kusturica. Written by Gordon Mihic and Emir Kusturica. With Bajram Severdzan, Florijan Ajdini, Sabri Sulejmani, Salija Ibraimova, and Branka Katic. A USA Films release. At the Cable Car.

Although neither simple nor simply told, the plot serves merely as the pretext for a series of outrages, grand gestures, and rambunctious social gatherings meant to convey an indomitable vitality. The film takes place somewhere in Eastern Europe, in the present day. During an attempt to divert a fuel train, Gypsy black-marketer Matko (Bajram Severdzan) runs afoul of superthug Dadan (Srdan Todorovic). Matko finds himself obliged to marry off his innocent son, Zare (Florijan Ajdini), to Dadan's dwarfish sister. But with the aid of benevolent crimelord Grga (Sabri Sulejmani), Zare turns the tables on Dadan and is reunited with his true love, the sexy barmaid Ida (Branka Katic).

Abrasive and vertiginous, Black Cat, White Cat fluctuates from black comedy to comic romance to the kind of paean to communal life Kusturica previously offered in Time of the Gypsies. The tone Kusturica adopts most frequently is that of farce. Not only are there no slow moments in the film, but everything is pitched high: shouting, exaggeration, violence. Every shot seems to hurl the actors into a junkstore- or barnyard-like set-up where their very existence on screen depends on their ability to fight off the animals and the clutter that threaten to bury them.

The characters are kept so busy at this that they have no time to rise above caricature. The one who comes closest to doing so -- or who, perhaps, is caricatured most truly -- is the most evil, Dadan, a cocaine-powered maniac whose worst crimes we're left to imagine (he's said to be a war criminal) and who pumps up the already overdriven goings-on at every opportunity. Otherwise only the mocking, tomboyish Ida appears to have any independent life apart from the compulsive activity of the film. For the rest, we have sentimentally drawn grotesques like Grga, who endlessly rewatches the last scene of Casablanca, and barely existing characters like Zare who require us to take them on faith as holders of certain functions in the story.

Their very conventionality, however, helps us see them as actors in a folktale, and that gives the film a curious half-life between reality and ritual. The action hinges on the legendary, death-defying friendship between Grga and the father of Matko. Family obligations -- including, most strangely, the amoral Dadan's desire to see his sister married -- are paramount. During the wedding-party sequence that takes up much of the film's last third, the social space of Black Cat, White Cat becomes charged with strong magnetic attractions, and its visual space takes on an enchanted fluidity. Architecture is permeable: water leaks through floors, people fall through trap doors, and cats crawl through a hole in the roof. The final section is less a dénouement than a series of crashes.

The collapsing of levels invites (like the climbing-and-descending motif in Kusturica's Underground) a political reading of the film as a dismantling of hierarchy or an image of post-Communist chaos. For Kusturica, breakdown holds the promise of renewal -- a promise most directly evoked in the magic of travel through space. Grga's trailer, both house and vehicle of transport, is a self-contained, miraculous dream world, of which Dadan's limo is a streamlined, modernized variant. Periodically during the film, Kusturica cuts away to show us an abandoned car being eaten by a pig. In a movie as obsessed with movement as this one, the worst possible disaster that can befall anything or anybody is not to be able to go anymore. But by turning the car into pig food, Kusturica makes us see the derelict vehicle as still subject to the law of transformation that holds sway in his film's universe.

Eventually, the couples who belong together find each other, and the innocent characters escape to a maybe better world, in a happy end that's also the renewal of a cycle. Despite its exasperating mania, Black Cat, White Cat ends up being likable and interesting. But it's still more ordeal than comedy.