Marko and Blacky join forces for a while to thwart occupying Nazi forces in ways that border on slapstick. Kusturica does not cast introverts. And he directs some of the film so broadly that it resembles silent comedy. An eagerness to steal Vera helps induce Marko to lure his friend underground. The film's central plot device finds Blacky and friends, not to mention a pet chimpanzee, tricked into living in a cellar below Marko's home.
Years go by.
Marko hangs onto Vera and becomes a prominent party official, while his friends underground manufacture munitions, convinced by Marko's tricks and by his recording of air raid sirens that the war is not over. Playing out the game between Blacky and Marko in toweringly dramatic terms and in a vast political arena, the film also finds time for curious and welcome bursts of humor. Blacky's return to the real world coincides with the filming of a heroic account of Marko's wartime experiences, so that Blacky cannot distinguish between reality and deception. The film's anger is communicated most powerfully at such nominally playful moments. The film is nominally shorter than it was at Cannes, but its party scenes still unfold with an endless and exhausting frenzy until every last tuba has been heard.