Summary:
The shifty Matko Destanov (Bajram Severdžan) is forced to marry off his teenage son Zare (Florijan Ajdini) to the midget sister of gangster Dadan Karambolo (Srd–an Todorovic´) in order to settle a debt, Dadan having diddled Matko on the heist of a trainload of smuggled oil. In love with waitress-cum-girl-next-door Ida (Branka Katic´), Zare has other ideas, and is assisted by his seriously ill grandfather Zarije (Zabit Memedov), who decides to die on the wedding day and thus delay, if not scuttle, Matko and Dadan’s down-low arrangement. Mayhem ensues: Dadan insists the wedding proceed, Zarije’s corpse is ‘iced’ in the attic, and the unwilling bride, the horizontally challenged Aphrodita (Salija Ibraimova), elopes during the festivities. On the run and hidden under a tree stump she finds protection and unconditional love in the arms of the giant Grga Veliki (Jasar Destani), the unwed son of wizened ‘boss of bosses’ Grga Pitic´ (Sabri Sulejman), who is en route to visit the grave of his old compadre Zarije, Matko having claimed – while weaselling more sponsorship for the botched oil deal – that Zarije had died the previous year. Shots are fired, two new weddings are scheduled (Zare and Ida, Aphrodita and Grga Veliki), Grga Pitic´ has a heart attack and joins Zarije on ice in the attic, and by the closing credits Dadan, having fallen in the longdrop, is wiping shit from himself with one of the film’s ubiquitous geese.
Analysis:
Bruised by criticism that his 1995 Palme d’Or winning Underground (Podzemlje) was ‘hackneyed and deceitful Serb propaganda’ (quoted in Iordanova 2001: 117) as French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut emblematically labelled it, in 1996, Emir Kusturica announced to a shocked cinema world that he was retiring from filmmaking at age 41. Centring on the unsettling relationship between aesthetics, ideology and cinema as national allegory, the critical division surrounding Underground also serves as an illuminating backdrop to the genesis of Black Cat, White Cat, Kusturica’s ‘comeback’ film and direct response to the furore. Although some have dismissed the film as a minor work full of ‘irrelevant diversions’ (Wrathall 1999), Black Cat, White Cat epitomises Kusturica’s ‘everything plus the kitchen sink’ (Gocic´ 2001: 1) aesthetic of excess. Featuring many of Kusturica’s most beloved leitmotifs, it provokes different questions, among them, those of ethnic stereotyping and the ethics of representing subaltern groups, particularly those who in global popular culture have limited access to representing themselves.
Kusturica was born in 1954, in Sarajevo, BosniaHerzegovina, one of the former Yugoslavia’s six constituent republics, to secular Bosnian Muslim parents. His debut feature Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (Sjec´aš li se Dolly Bell?, 1981) won the Silver Lion for Best First Work at the Venice Film Festival, while his sophomore effort, While Father Was Away on Business (1985, Otac na službenom putu) gained him both his first Palme d’Or and an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film. Time of the Gypsies (Dom za vešanje, 1988) further reinforced Kusturica’s auteur reputation, before the relative failure of Arizona Dream (1992), his first foray into filmmaking in the United States.
While Kusturica had never shied away from politics in his previous films, Underground represented a personal and political act of caesura at a time when his fast becoming former homeland was undergoing a bloody caesura of its own. For his detractors, Kusturica’s fleeting insertion of archival footage of Slovenian and Croatian crowds cheering the arrival of Nazi troops in Maribor and Zagreb (contrasted with footage of the Nazi bombing of the Serbian capital of Belgrade) was a subliminal attempt to historically justify Serbian military aggression in civil wars of the early 1990s. Perhaps given the fact that these elliptical scenes were unlikely to have been understood by most international audiences, the indictment against Kusturica was completed by aggravating off-screen factors. His disavowal of his Bosnian Muslim heritage in favour of a newly discovered Serbian one (on grounds that his ancestors were forcibly converted to Islam by the Ottoman Turks), literal and political abandonment of besieged Sarajevo for the comparative safety of Belgrade (and then Paris), and not least 174 Crna macˇka, beli macˇor/Black Cat, White Cat (1998) the revelation that Underground received a reported ten million US dollars of funding from Slobodan Miloševic´’s ‘rump’ Yugoslav regime, all put Kusturica in the stocks as a proponent of incendiary Serbian nationalism. When his contention that Underground was in fact a mourning work for the death of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia failed to quell the uproar (support for Yugoslavia’s territorial integrity inevitably meant support for its violent enforcement), Kusturica, at least for a short time, drew a temporary curtain on his career.
Licking his wounds, Kusturica originally conceived the film that became Black Cat, White Cat as a documentary on Gypsy brass bands. Looking beyond the farcical ‘Rom(a)com’ 1 it turned into, however, a number of critics have suggested that Kusturica’s loving portrayal of freewheeling Balkan Gypsies was a ‘projection of his own ostracism and homelessness.’ It is a contention on which perhaps the thorniest dilemmas surrounding the film hang. Does Black Cat, White Cat confirm or challenge popular stereotypes about Roma/Gypsies? (Or does it manage to be simultaneously hegemonic and subversive?) Do we watch Black Cat, White Cat as a ‘realistic’ ethnographic document or as an autonomous act of cinematic creation by an offbeat auteur? Is the film as apolitical as commonly thought?
The carnivalesque nature of the caper keeps the all-singing, all-dancing ‘poor but happy’ Gypsy shtick on overdrive throughout. Snorting cocaine (kept in a crucifix vial) Dadan struts out a disco Balkan bird dance unlikely to ever have any Gangnam Style afterlife; Matko straddles a ceiling joist, Dadan and Zare swinging from his legs, screaming ‘my balls are jammed’; a kleptomaniac Bulgarian customs officer is hung dead from a train crossing arm, Mary Poppins’ umbrella in hand; a fat lady with a lacquered quiff sings – but it’s not over until she extracts a nail from a piece of wood with her sphincter; Dadan and his mobsters ‘Cossack dance’ on Matko’s head. Yet ‘the musical Gypsy’ is far from the only exaggerated stereotype Kusturica goes in for. Dadan, for example, embodies the racist folklore of the Gypsy male’s alleged sexual menace towards non-Roma women, while in casting Grga Pitic´ as a rubbish dump magnate, Kusturica manages something of a personal trifecta: garbage disposal is a favoured enterprise of mobsters worldwide, scrapheaps are entrenched in the popular imagination as a locus of impoverished Gypsy life, and in a nod to his own oeuvre, the rubbish dump provided one of the key settings for Time of the Gypsies. Noted East European film scholar Dina Iordanova goes as far as to suggest that the film represents an act of ‘overt exploitation or exoticisation of Gypsies’ (2003: 88) which on the basis of the evidence above, is certainly a legitimate claim. But might something also be said in Kusturica’s defence?
To begin with the obvious, it requires a level of disingenuousness to argue that Black Cat, White Cat makes the slightest attempt at verisimilitude, that is, to portray ‘real existing’ Roma life. Secondly, there is an underlying chauvinism in Iordanova’s tone that suggests Kusturica, a non-Roma, has no right to represent Roma and that a Roma director would do things better, or at least more ‘authentically’. This kind of biographical logic is foremostly a violation of artistic freedom, and then, in effect, a diktat that filmmakers only represent their own (national, ethnic, sexual, gender) communities. Thirdly, for all their madcap foibles, Kusturica’s Gypsies come off very positively in a number of respects. Whether it is Matko’s paternal love for his son Zare, Dadan’s somewhat obsessive love for his sisters, or the warm fraternity of the two paterfamilias, the protagonists frequently display admirable solidarity and bonhomie towards one and other. Judging the film on a single axis of ethics and representation is also to ignore its significant formal properties, including the references to Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942),2 Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), Kusturica’s own body of work, not to mention its many self-referential elements, i.e. the drawing attention to its own cinematic artifice. Finally, if Kusturica really is doing his Gypsies such a disservice, where does that leave Sasha Baron Cohen’s infinitely more popular Borat (2006)? As Eliot Borenstein reminds us, the opening scenes of Borat’s home village in ‘Kazakhstan’ were actually shot in a Romany village in Romania, and as Borenstein notes, the villagers were oblivious to Baron Cohen’s documentary ruse, their poor command of English meaning they had no idea he was presenting them as ‘prostitutes, rapists, and pedophiles’ (2008: 5).3
While the popular contention that Black Cat, White Cat is essentially an apolitical film is hard to dispute outright, such a reading nevertheless elides the fact that in politically turbulent times, ignoring politics is in itself a defiantly political act. If Black Cat, White Cat does offer political inflections, then it is the recurring image of an enormous pig munching on the plastic carcass of a Trabant – perhaps the emblematic symbol of Eastern Europe’s failed industrial modernity – that provides best for rumination, a tragi-comic goodbye to the vanished world of European communism. Elsewhere, the smugglers who peddle dodgy oil and whiteware of dubious provenance along the Danube also have strong referents in reality. Serbia spent the 1990s under crippling economic sanctions, as western leaders tried to bring the Miloševic´ regime, if not to its knees, then at least to heel. And in an in-joke that local (former Yugoslav) audiences would certainly not have missed, Matko first refers to Dadan being a ‘war criminal’, and then later, a ‘businessman patriot’. Oil smuggling was the ‘patriotic’ business venture of choice for many an exYugoslav war criminal, making Grga Pitic´’s counterfeit whiskey operation seem positively quaint in comparison.
Unlike Underground, which closed with the words ‘This story has no end’, its motley cast floating off to sea on a small island symbolically carved like an iceberg from a larger land mass, the fairytale of Black Cat, White Cat closes with an emphatic ‘Happy Ending’. With Zarije’s advice that ‘the sun never shines here’ still ringing in his ears, Zare sneakily escorts his bride aboard a German cruise ship and together they glide off down the Danube into the distance. While it is impossible to speculate on whether this kind of escapist fantasy was Kusturica’s note to self, he returned from France to live more or less permanently in Serbia in the early noughties. Having apparently regained his appetite for on- and off-screen scrapping, he continues to cinematically pick over the elegiac bones of the Balkans – picking many a new fight in the process.
David Williams
Notes
1. Following the sensitive and sensible lead of Nikolina Dobreva, I use the term ‘Gypsies’ when referring to their representation (both in the film and popular culture more generally), and the more correct ‘Roma’ to refer to the ethnic group itself.
2. For more on this see Francesco Caviglia’s ‘What is Rick Doing in the Balkans? Quotes from Casablanca in Kusturica’s Black Cat, White Cat (1998)’, p.o.v. 14 (December 2002), pp. 41– 52.
3. Borenstein also suggests a number of pertinent links between Borat and Kusturica’s ‘Gypsy’ film.
Cast and Crew:
[Country: Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, France, Germany, Austria, Greece, USA. Production Company: Ciby 2000, Pandora Film, Komuna, and France 2 Cinéma. Director: Emir Kusturica. Producer: Karl Baumgartner. Screenwriters: Emir Kusturica and Gordan Mihic´. Cinematographer: Crna macˇka, beli macˇor/Black Cat, White Cat (1998) 173 Thierry Arbogast. Music: Dr Nele Karajilic´, Vojislav Aralica and Dejan Sparavalo. Editor: Svetolik Zajc. Cast: Bajram Severdžan (Matko Destanov), Florijan Ajdini (Zare Destanov), Zabit Memedov (Zarije Destanov), Sabri Sulejman (Grga Pitic´), Jasar Destani (Grga Veliki), Srd–an Todorovic´ (Dadan Karambolo), Branka Katic´ (Ida), Salija Ibraimova (Afrodita).]
Further Reading:
Eliot Borenstein, ‘Our Borats, Our Selves: Yokels and Cosmopolitans on the Global Stage’, Slavic Review 67.1, Spring 2008, pp. 1–7.
Nikolina Dobreva, ‘Constructing the “Celluloid Gypsy”’, Romani Studies 5, 17.2, pp. 141–154.
Goran Gocic´, Notes from the Underground: The Cinema of Emir Kusturica, London, Wallflower Press, 2001.
J. Hoberman, ‘Chaos Theories’, Village Voice, September 7, 1999. Available at: www.villagevoice.com/1999- 09-07/film/chaos-theories/1/ (accessed 15 October 2012).
Sean Homer, ‘Retrieving Emir Kusturica’s Underground as a Critique of Ethnic Nationalism’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51, Spring 2009. Available at: www.ejumpcut.org/ archive/jc51.2009/Kusterica/index.html (accessed 18 October 2012).
Dina Iordanova, (ed.), Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 44.2 (Special issue: Cinematic Images of Romanies), Fall 2003.
Pavle Levi, Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2007.
John Wrathall, ‘Black Cat, White Cat – Review’, Sight and Sound, May 1999. Available at: http://old. bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/97 (accessed April 15, 2013).
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.