Black Cat White Cat

rated - SIMMERING

It's a mad mad mad mad world

Emir Kusturica vowed, after the political lambasting he got after his last film Underground, that he would never make another film. Luckily he did, because he's an extraordinary film maker.

In Black Cat White Cat he revisits the gypsy people whom he filmed in The Time of the Gypsies (1989). Black cat White Cat was apparently conceived as a documentary, but with people like this it must have almost immediately turned into a performance piece! These people are stark raving mad!

Kusturica's camera follows them everywhere, giving us scene after scene of mayhem and madness. There are animals, guns, money and bad teeth everywhere. Somehow, Kusturica manages to inject a plot (of sorts) into the proceedings (even if he does have to punctuate it with shots of geese or a pig steadily devouring a car, for reasons known only to the pig.

All's well that ends well, and I think that Kusturica's resolution of the film is just as elegant as the solution one of the grandfathers proposes to stop the wedding of his grandson to the wrong woman.

A beautiful-looking film populated by terrible-looking people having more fun than most people could dream about. "Imagine if every patient in the hospital brought their own band" complains a nurse. Imagine, indeed.