Underground: Kusturica's Cellar-Bound History of Yugoslavia

The premise of Underground (1995) is so good that people who have never seen the film can recite it. A man hides a group of friends and relatives in a Belgrade cellar during the German occupation. When the war ends, he does not tell them. He keeps them down there for twenty years, manufacturing weapons for a war that finished two decades ago, while he goes upstairs and becomes a decorated Communist poet, a Party figure, and a rich man on the profits of their labour.

You could get a decent political satire out of that in ninety minutes. Emir Kusturica instead made a 167-minute carnival with a brass band physically running through the frame, a chimpanzee in a tank, thirty years of archive newsreel spliced with his actors, and an ending that floats away down a river. Then the film won the Palme d’Or, and a great many French intellectuals decided he was a war criminal.

It is the most argued-about European film of the 1990s and it is worth watching before you take a side.

What it is

The full title, in its Yugoslav form, is Once Upon a Time There Was a Country. The film runs in three movements: War, Cold War, War.

Marko (Miki Manojlović) is a black-marketeer and Party man with a talent for the grand gesture. Blacky — Petar “Crni” Popara (Lazar Ristovski) — is his friend, a walking appetite: guns, drink, women, revolution, roughly in that order. Both of them want Natalija (Mirjana Joković), a theatre actress with a keen instinct for whichever occupying force currently controls the food supply. Marko’s brother Ivan (Slavko Štimac) is a stuttering zookeeper who loves a chimpanzee named Soni more than he loves any human being, and who is the closest thing the film has to a conscience.

The Germans bomb Belgrade in 1941. The zoo goes up. Animals run through the burning streets — the sequence is one of the great openings in European cinema and Kusturica shot it for real, with real animals and real fire. Marko puts everyone in the cellar. And then history happens above their heads while they carry on assembling rifles by lamplight, celebrating weddings, aging, and waiting for a liberation that arrived without them.

Why it works: the mechanics of controlled chaos

Underground looks like a film made by a man who has lost control. It is the opposite, and the evidence is in four specific techniques.

The brass band is a physical object in the world. Bregović’s musicians are in the picture, in shot, following Blacky through rooms and across fields, playing at maximum volume during arguments, funerals and shootouts. Characters shout at them to shut up. This does two things: it makes the film’s relentless energy diegetic — the mania belongs to the characters — and it means the music can be interrupted, which turns silence into an event. The moments where the band stops are the moments Kusturica wants you to feel.

The archive footage is compromised on purpose. Kusturica takes real newsreel of the German entry into Belgrade, the war, the liberation, Tito’s funeral, and composites his actors into it. Marko appears in genuine historical film. The technique had already been used for jokes; here it makes a much nastier point. History as we have it is footage, and footage can be edited, and the men who own the edit suite own the past. The whole film is about a man who controls what other people believe reality is. Kusturica builds that argument into the material itself.

The camera moves like something escaping. Vilko Filač’s cinematography is almost never static — Steadicam ploughing through crowds, through cellars, through underground tunnels that turn out to run under half of Europe. Long takes crammed with simultaneous incident. You cannot rest, which is the point: a viewer who cannot rest cannot get their bearings, and a viewer without bearings is in roughly the same epistemic position as the people in the cellar.

The comedy is loaded. The film is genuinely, physically funny for long stretches — Blacky’s wedding, the animal business, the sheer scale of Marko’s lying. Kusturica understands that a laughing audience has its guard down. Every atrocity in Underground arrives about ninety seconds after a joke.

Ristovski’s Blacky is the performance that makes it survivable. He plays a man of enormous appetite and no interiority, and he plays him with such warmth that you are complicit in liking him long before you are asked to account for what he does.

The real ancestor

The obvious answers are Fellini for the carnival and The Tin Drum for German history refracted through grotesque, and they are both defensible.

The real ancestor is Dušan Makavejev. Yugoslav cinema had already produced its own tradition of political collage — WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) cut fiction, documentary, Stalinist musical clips and sexual comedy together into a single indigestible object, and got itself banned at home for the trouble. Everything Underground does with archive footage, with tonal whiplash, with using laughter as an anaesthetic before the incision, Makavejev did first, in the same country, under the same Party that Marko is climbing. Kusturica’s film is the Black Wave tradition given a Palme d’Or budget and let off the leash. Watch WR and Underground in a week and the lineage is unmistakable.

The collector’s shelf: Time of the Gypsies is the same director doing the same magic-in-the-mud with a fraction of the volume, and I would start there. Come and See is the film that proves you can take exactly the opposite approach to the same century and land just as hard. The Devil’s Backbone does the buried-past metaphor as a ghost story. And Sátántangó is the Hungarian answer to the same question — what happens to people when the system that organised their lives evaporates — answered at seven hours and in slow motion.

The controversy, straight

You cannot write about this film honestly without it. Within weeks of the Palme d’Or, Alain Finkielkraut published a broadside in Le Monde calling the film Serbian nationalist propaganda and a whitewash of Milošević-era crimes. He had not seen it. Bernard-Henri Lévy joined in. The charge stuck hard enough that Kusturica publicly announced he was giving up filmmaking, which lasted about as long as such announcements usually do.

Having watched it several times, the propaganda charge does not survive contact with the film. Underground is savage about Serbian mythology — the whole comic engine is that its heroes are drunk, credulous, self-mythologising men being farmed by a liar who writes epic poetry about their heroism. There is a real critique available, which is subtler: that the film’s grief is for Yugoslavia specifically, that its final image mourns a lost unity without asking too hard who broke it, and that a work this seductive can let a viewer feel the tragedy of the wars while learning nothing about their causes. That is worth arguing. The 1995 version — that Kusturica made a recruitment film — was an accusation about a man rather than a reading of a picture.

The case against

The film is exhausting, and the exhaustion is not always doing work. Two hours and forty-seven minutes at this pitch means the third act has to shout to be heard over the first two, and it does. The women get thin material: Natalija is written as appetite and opportunism, and Joković finds more in her than the script supplies. The five-hour television cut, which exists and is easier to find than it used to be, is a better-paced film and almost nobody will ever watch it.

And the film’s central metaphor — the cellar, the lie, the manufactured war — is so strong that the last hour cannot equal it. Once the deception breaks, Underground has nowhere left to escalate except volume.

The verdict

It remains the most ambitious thing anyone has attempted about the end of Yugoslavia, and it is the only film I know that makes the pleasure of nationalism legible from the inside — the music, the drink, the wedding, the sheer joy of being told you are a hero. That is why it is dangerous and why it is great. A film that condemned Blacky would teach you nothing. This one makes you love him first.

Bregović’s music will be in your head for a fortnight. That is the film performing its own thesis on you.

It circulates on the arthouse streaming platforms and has had solid disc editions; take the theatrical cut first, and give yourself an evening with nothing after it.

Spoilers below

Marko keeps the cellar sealed from 1941 to 1961. He runs the clock slow, stages air-raid sounds, and above ground he builds a career as the poet laureate of a resistance hero he has personally buried alive. He marries Natalija. He and she are, in the film’s most audacious joke, present at Tito’s funeral as grieving dignitaries.

Blacky and his son eventually break out during a wedding, chase the escaped Soni through the tunnels, and surface — in the middle of a film set, where a director is shooting a heroic war picture based on Marko’s lying poems about Blacky’s death. Blacky, believing the Germans are still here, starts shooting the actors. It is the best sustained sequence Kusturica has ever directed, and it is an entire theory of propaganda in ten minutes: the man returns from the lie and cannot tell the reconstruction from the war.

The tunnels turn out to run everywhere under Europe, full of people who never came up. The film jumps to the 1990s. Marko and Natalija are now arms dealers selling into the Yugoslav wars. Blacky is a warlord who does not know who he is fighting. He orders the execution of two prisoners without looking at them; they are Marko and Natalija, and they burn strapped to a wheelchair that spins into a shape you cannot mistake for anything but a cross. Ivan, having finally learnt the whole of his brother’s twenty-year lie, beats Marko with his cane and then hangs himself in a bell tower.

And then Kusturica does the thing that redeems the whole exhausting enterprise. The dead reassemble at a wedding feast by a river — everyone, reconciled, dancing, the band at full tilt — and the piece of land they are standing on cracks away from the shore and drifts off downstream. Ivan turns to the camera and tells us that this is the story we will tell our children, and that it will begin: once upon a time there was a country. A title card says the story has no end.

It is a fantasy of forgiveness that the film has spent nearly three hours proving impossible, floating away from the mainland in real time. Kusturica gives his characters a heaven and simultaneously shows you that it has come loose from the earth. Whatever else you conclude about the politics, that is a filmmaker who knows exactly what he has just done.