Life Is A Miracle

Like Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1998) or Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) the title of this film encapsulates Kusturica’s message. The Bosnian war of the early '90s provides the backdrop for the demonstration of that message in the story of Serb railwayman Luka (Slavko Stimac), his loopy wife, the Muslim woman he falls for (Natasa Solak) and the general madcap antics of  the village in which he lives.

If idiosyncracy and exuberance alone were enough to make a good film Kusturica would count as a master film-maker. Since his 1989 film, Time Of the Gypsies, the director has subsequently with Underground (1995) and Black Cat, White Cat (1998) gradually taken that film’s wonderfully over-the-top mix of absurd situations, eccentric characters and irresistibly energetic gypsy music to ever more exaggerated heights. Unfortunately at the same time he has also found less need for any narrative or dramatic integrity and with this film arrives at an apparent stylistic endpoint with a concatenation of  visual and aural excess which although sometimes amusing will have most people worn out long before the end is nigh.

 

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