Emir Kusturica is the Sarajevo-born director renowned for being a member of the exclusive Cannes double-Palme club. Like Ken Loach and the Dardenne brothers, he has won the Palme d’Or twice, for When Father Was Away on Business (1985) and Underground (1995) – the movies that first stunned audiences with his signature high-energy style, staggeringly ambitious crowd scenes and sustained black-comic action sequences. They were a Fellini-esque profusion of music, crowds, animals and anarchic humour. He is also renowned for making comments (and indeed films) sympathetic to the Serbian side in the Bosnian war of the 1990s, although his movie Life Is a Miracle offered an emollient love story between a Bosnian Muslim and a Serb.
His new movie, On the Milky Road, is a flawed, indulgent but impressive picture along very familiar lines – another wildly boozy knees-up with splashes of magic realism and tragedy, here garnished with CGI. It is possible to be bit blase about the bravura performance Kusturica conjures: it’s still a distinctive achievement, and the director’s visual sense is tremendous.
Kusturica himself stars as Kosta, a guy who has the somewhat unlikely job of delivering fresh milk in the warzone of the 90s Bosnian conflict. He travels a “milky road” because he believes he has seen a miracle there: a snake lapping up milk in pools by the roadside.
Kosta falls in love with a beautiful Italian-Serb woman played by Monica Bellucci, who has already driven a British Nato general mad with desire. She is now wanted by various murderous elements and is hiding out in a camp for stateless refugees, where she watches her favourite film, Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying, every day. She has been promised in marriage to the brother of the woman who is passionately in love with Kosta, played raucously by Sloboda Micalovic. But the lovers are not to be kept apart as war erupts all around, culminating in the surreal, delirious, stomach-turning spectacle of a flock of sheep being driven onto a minefield. The result is woolly carnage.
Bellucci is rather stately in the role and Kusturica is a little self-conscious, but he has great screen presence. The apparently non-CGI scene where he feeds wedges of orange to a bear from his mouth is amazing in its way – a real alpha-male kiss. Kusturica’s son Stribor delivers the roistering music.
