Awful mystification

Rating: 1/10 (5 September 2004)

'Underground', like all the other Kusturica films is completely fake, mystifying & false story, with unoriginal characters, banal ideas, suspicious messages, and it is generally completely worthless as a piece of art. Good example of artificial creating of 'great artist' in a world without real criteria.
Mr. Kusturica is really a good professional director, which is nowadays pretty rare in a global art film industry (which is justified by so called avant-garde), but, he is also a narcissus (used to get it as a habit at a time when he was a spoiled child during his privileged position within a communist establishment environment childhood in ex-Yugoslavia).
Therefore he uses his 'artistic' copying of Mr. Bertolucci or Mr. Tarkovsky just to cover his own lack of original ideas or his banal 'heroes' (so called 'outsiders' but actually brutal and stupid primitives) or 'ingenious' considering of commonplaces in his quasi-political 'engagement'. He was a good friend with the management of 'RTS' (Serbian state TV broadcasting station during the peak of Milosevic's war propaganda) which had actually financed the 'anti-regime' films like the one I am writing about.
But, considering the last decade in the area of European artistic films like the period which cannot be described as really creative, Mr. Kusturica, thanks to the poor competition environment and exotic/wrong reading of his films (his characters and stories are fully realistic in Serbia, but, in The Western critics are interpreted and understood as surrealistic, and smartly created, because of cultural differences between The East and The West) has got the title of a 'great' European director.
Completely wrong! His only honest attempt to make a film with the clear ideas, without mystifying Balkan myths, ended like a complete disaster. That was, of course, his American failure, 'Arizona Dream'. That film shows the real Kusturica possibilities, without any manipulation. I personally find this film as the best he has made, no matter how bad it is. Because it is true, unlike the others.
If one likes to see the real artistic films, let's try with 'Crush', 'PI' or 'The Signs'. I won't name the directors. All the details can be found here in the movie database.