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Life is a Miracle review
:. Director: Emir Kusturica
:. Starring: Slavko Stimac, Vesna Trivalic
:. Running Time: 2:34
:. Year: 2002
:. Country: 2002
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What's miraculous about Emir Kusturica's cinema is his immense savoir-faire; what's disastrous are his doubtful ideological intentions.
Constructed in three distinct parts, Life Is A Miracle tells a love story with the turmoil of the Balkans in 1992 in the background. Kusturica sets his storyline in the confusing time which precedes ethnic purification.
The first part of the film is similar to a highly charged party, a trance where epileptic characters make up the elements of the drama. A railroad station master, married to a former depressive diva who's ready at any moment to reenact the great scene of Anna Karenina, falls in love with a pretty Muslim nurse who's been taken as a war hostage. She moves into the house of the hero, who has been abandoned by his unstable wife after a money exchange to get back his son who's been sent to war.
Kusturica resumes his plethoric universe where omnipresent music plays a major role. The filmmaker seeks excess and represents it onscreen. Men and animals make up a bestiary now perfectly identifiable in his work. Nothing is missing in his Noah's ark: a female donkey, in love and suicidal, then moving on to cats, dogs and horses who invite themselves to a chess game. Men and animals get on the tracks (a recurring metaphor of the rails followed by the protagonists during their trips) of a conflict which already exceeds them. The going away party for the young son headed to war, who's devoted to a career as a professional football player that's been broken by the war, finishes in the early morning in a sinister atmosphere.
The second part of film gets underway, devoted to the conflict and the thwarted passion of the station master. Kusturica's approach is very low-key in this terribly sensual segment. The impossible love which unites the heroes puts them in a line of cursed lovers, like Romeo and Juliette. War thunders far away and then approaches to explode, just like the love of the characters slowly follows its course until it gushes out, incandescent.
The third part, finally, is a nuanced epilogue, a sort of half-tinted happy ending. The father, who so hoped for the return of his beloved son, is granted a wish beyond his hopes: his wife returns and intends to go back to her place! Separated, the lovers find themselves in a fantastic scene which closes the film. A donkey, the guardian angel, stays up for their reunion.
Kusturica combines the fantasy of a complex universe, characterized by saturation, with the poetry of his syntax and the safety of his sense of the narration. For all this, the celebration of life, to which he invites the spectators, hostages brought by force to this deafening brass band of feelings, has a nauseating ideological stench. Explicitly pro-Serb, yet the filmmaker does not take a stand. And there's the rub. Since Underground, an extremely unhealthy film, the position of the filmmaker is known. In Life Is a Miracle, he does not give to see the confrontations, tending towards a universal demonstration of the nonsense of war. The fact remains that many indices in the film attest to an obvious resentment. Kusturica uses metaphors, like the cruel bears which devour an unfortunate man. There are still these small sentences disseminated in the film, which come out of the TV set, where it is question of the Serbian people, to him also victims in the story, of abuses of power. Kusturica leaves us in this uneasy indecision towards his latest film. Should we love Life Is a Miracle?
Sandrine Marques
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic
 Movie Reviews: European Films
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