Anniversary of the Underground

April 1, 1995, a movie "Underground" by Emir Kusturica was released on the screens of cinemas in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. So IMDB reports. Although by then the process of dismembering the state, known at one time as the SFRYu, had entered its final stage. It is no accident that the film has another name - "Once Upon a Time There Was a Country". Under this name, a 5-hour television version of the picture appeared on television.

Less than two months later, this film was awarded the Palme d'Or of the Cannes International Film Festival. And this despite the fact that literally from the moment the film was released, it was subjected to fierce criticism from a number of French critics.

Thus, Bernard Henri-Levy, considered as an "intellectual" in some rather narrow circles, who is sometimes called “a man whose mind is destroyed by his own ego,” simply stupidly repeated the accusations of Bosnian Muslims against Kusturica that he had betrayed his people, abandoned his ethnic roots and went over to the side of the enemy. And this betrayal, they say, was confirmed in the third part of the "Underground". Some other French "intellectuals" accused Kusturica's film of promoting Serbian nationalism. Moreover, they did it before watching the movie. Well, exactly the same as some convinced communists blasphemed "Doctor Zhivago" at one time: "I didn’t read Pasternak, but I know: the novel is harmful." The level is the same.

But the jury of the Cannes Film Festival, chaired by Jeanne Moreau, remained deaf to these attacks. Although, it should be noted, hardly anyone will deny that among the nominees for the Palme d'Or that year there were no worthy competitors to the film of Kusturica.

However, not only Franco-Jewish cultural and political scientists scoffed at the film and its author, accusing the latter of literally fascism, but some "intellectuals" from the former Yugoslav republics and even from Serbia itself harshly criticized the "Underground". Mostly because the author did not hide his regret over the collapse of Yugoslavia. Moreover, they criticized so harshly that Kusturica was forced to threaten to leave the cinema if these attacks did not stop.

Personally, when I watched the movie, I literally physically felt the pain of Kusturica from the realization of the death of his native country. And from my point of view, this is the greatest merit of the picture, for which some of its flaws can be forgiven, in particular, the protractedness of a number of scenes.

Nevertheless, Serbia nominated the "Underground" for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. But members of the Academy of Film Academy did not include Kusturica's film in the list of Oscar nominees. And in the end, the composition of the nominees turned out to be so weak that the Dutch film "Antonia" was declared the winner. Have you seen this movie? Is it better than "Underground"?

Although the American Film Academy denied the film Underground the right to participate in the Oscars, American film critics generally favored Kusturica’s creation. So, for example, the movie observer of the influential New York Times, Janet Maslin, wrote about the picture:

"Though the politics of ''Underground'' have been assailed and dissected by international audiences (the film still has no American distributor, despite obvious merits that outweigh its carousing excesses), the debate is largely specious. There's no hidden agenda to this robust and not terribly subtle tale of duplicity. Mr. Kusturica's central idea becomes a daringly blunt representation of political chicanery that fools an entire society, and of the corruption that lets one man thrive at the expense of his dearest friend."

One of the most respected Russian film critics, Sergey Kudryavtsev, rated Kusturitsa’s film with 8 points on a 10-point scale and described this film in his 2006 review:

“The "Underground" may seem to be stretched to the size a very bizarre (sometimes almost surrealistic) tale of a usual joke from a series about partisans who never found out about the end of the war and continued to hide in secret places, occasionally making bold attacks directed against the invaders of their native land But the initial comic situation serves as a pretext for Emir Kusturica to create a large-scale phantasmagoria of all surrounding reality over the past half century, when each individual involuntarily felt like a prisoner of time, proudly hoping that in fact he is a hostage to eternity. However, the eternal turned out to be fleeting, and not a pathos-free struggle for existence - an ordinary escape from reality, an analogue of the cowardly digging of an ostrich's head in the sand. The underground turned into a semblance of a crypt with people buried alive."

In the second half of the 90s, the official premieres of the film "Underground", despite all the criticism addressed to it, were held in almost all countries of Europe and the Western Hemisphere. Just not in Russia. In Yeltsin Russia, whose leadership was proud to be involved in the collapse of a great country, the film, the author of which openly regretted the death of his country, accounted for what is called "out of court". Yes, it could be watched on VHS or on DVD. But the official premiere of the picture in Russia took place only in 2001. After understandable political changes happened in the country.

Well, and in conclusion - about the success of the film with the audience. According to Wikipedia "the total world fees for the film amounted to 17,155,263 US dollars. In the United States, $ 6,719,864 was raised, in Russia - $ 195,000." As they say, feel the difference. That is, the film paid off at the box office, since its budget was $ 14 million. And this is good, given all the circumstances.

More than 73% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users worldwide rated this film 8 to 10. Based on this and other success indicators given above, the film's rating, according to FilmGourmand, was 8.140, which allowed the film to occupy the 550th place in the Golden Thousand.