A Man Without a Case

A tuxedo in Cannes is neither a whim nor foppery, but an absolute must, whether you are a camera operator at work hauling around a 10-kilo camcorder on the shoulder, a visiting star coming here to claim the palm branch, a lonely film fan who has long grown into his dishabille, or the chairman of the festival jury, the dress code has no exceptions. You will not be admitted to film shows or to the red carpet without a tuxedo. In Cannes, even Emir Kusturica forces himself into this abhorrent mournful package.

Like a Gypsy, he wears an opalescent shirt under the smoking jacket— an object of mockery by style experts. There are clotting curls of short whiskers and a face guiltless of powder above the smoking jacket. It is a broad nature boxed in an official case. He resents: “The current festivals are like fashion shows: there is a winter film collection and a summer one”. It seems to observers that a warning sign is glowing on the shiny forehead of the Balkan rebel: “No Smoking Jackets!” It is not in the sense of smoking—everywhere where smoking is allowed and almost everywhere where it’s prohibited, Kusturica appears with a chewed cigar in his teeth. “No Smoking Jackets!” comes in its literal sense.

This summer he arrived in Moscow in khaki tin pants and a stretched t-shirt, and it wasn’t for a concert at some night club in Moscow with his The No Smoking Orchestra, but to the cinema festival headed by Nikita Mikhalkov, bringing along his new movie, The Testament, that actually won the contest. He came to his folks—to ‘the city built by a drunken pastry chef’, to the heirs of the Russian culture, which he adores.

Kusturica’s love for his Slavic brothers in general and to Russians in particular is irrational, just like any other big feeling. He had lots of projects in Russia alone—all of them large ones and none of them realized. He planned to screen Crime and Punishment starring Johnny Depp, shoot a movie based on Eduard Limonov’s biography and a historical movie about the sect of Spirit Wrestlers persecuted by the tsarist regime. He wanted to play the part of Hippo Cat in the Master and Margarita. Finally, he wanted to shoot a movie about the Mexican revolution and its hero, Pancho Villa, a hoodlum general, in Russia. Even his producers are confused about which of these projects has been forgotten and which are just postponed.

Alas, Russians are sometimes also disappointing. When you make a tour of the new capitalist Moscow attired in lights and advertisements, you can hardly notice any trace of the famous spirituality in the streets. It is upsetting. “I asked Russians: how can you turn yourselves into yuppies when you had Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, and Benya Krik, for heaven’s sake?! I am telling you about your true nature, I’m telling you: you are killing Benya Krik! And they come back at me: What freaking nature are you talking about! Let us get a life; we have been under the Communists for the last fifty years…”

This time again: he wanted to make it a family event, but the festival’s host did not like Kusturica’s pants. The lord of Russian cinema, who patronizingly calls the man who won the Cannes Award on two occasions, the diminutive Emirochka, was horrified by the guest’s spontaneity and right away gave him an odious tuxedo, a case.

“He came in like a dock rat! One can’t wear a military suit to the opening ceremony!”

That was a gift that couldn’t be rejected. Wearing another person’s jacket, Emir Kusturica was made to look decent again. He thanked his Russian colleague cordially at conferences, perhaps, too cordially.

“I don’t have my own clothes. I will wear whatever he gives me. He is a big man, he has plenty of clothing!”

He is either naпve or scornful. A Gypsy man from his movie describes another Gypsy as follows: “He is a big man. He is two meters tall, his arms are like shovels. He has teeth growing in two rows: one is golden, the other one is regular. He is as elegant as a banker!”

‘I asked the Russians: how can you turn yourselves into yuppies, when you had Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, and Benya Krik, for heaven’s sake?!’

Kusturica does not look like a banker. It is not his role: even in childhood, he wanted to become a janitor, not a millionaire. It was the romanticism of the time: a boy from Sarajevo uptown saw himself with a broom in the morning streets of his not so clean town. He was neither an excellent student, nor an underachiever. He was a rowdy boy, just like anybody else, another one of the motley gang of the Yugoslavian street urchins.

Bosnian Muslims, Serbians, Croatians, Gypsies, children of the Communists, laymen, tramps and boozers kicked the ball together in a bandbox where a mosque, a synagogue, a Catholic and an Orthodox church got along peacefully within 300 meters of each other. They used to steal plums together. They went to the cinema almost every day. And they often fought each other for ordinary boys’ reasons, excluding the ethnic one. This is how childhood is seen from a distance of several decades when entry to the homeland is denied, the house was burnt down long ago, and half of the former schoolmates—those who are still alive—will never hold out a hand to you. The only thing you have left is to shoot movies about a lost paradise.

Emir Kusturica comes from his own childhood. He is a South Slavic Peter Pan who refused to become an adult. His first name means ‘prince’ (in Arabic), and his last name means backsword, blade-that-is-sharp-like-razor (in Serbian). Kitsch was the sinewy flesh of his Balkan life back then; bad taste was its taste; muddle was its style; vulgarism mixed up with drama. All of this, in a non-varnished form, shows in his movies and his biography.

His life shaped up in unusual ways. Or very usual ones, but not in the way the public expected. Real life episodes turned into anecdotes. When the Venice Festival was held in 1981, Emir Kusturica, a young Yugoslavian film director, was serving his country in the military forces. The commander issued him a ticket for a one-day leave. He rushed to Venice and had just enough time to pick up his Golden Lion for his full-length debut Do You Remember Dolly Bell?

Four years later, Kusturica won in Cannes with his second full-length movie—Daddy on a Business Trip. The teacher of Sarajevo’s cinema school brought a palm branch home—to a small town of 300,000 people. They met him like a hero; the town VIPs and senior officials of the Republic wanted to see him; he received invitations from everywhere. And he opted for…joining the scandalous No Smoking Orchestra, a punk group with impudent songs, which had recently rocked with a risky pun countrywide, when the bass guitar player, Nele Karajlich, the group’s leader, yelled at a big concert: “Marshall died!”, meaning either a Marshall guitar amplifier or the self-perpetuating president Tito, the unconfirmed rumors of whose death were circulating across the country. After this escapade, the musicians and their music were banned in Yugoslavia.

And it is in such a suspect band that the steaming professor of the public cinema school is hopping on the stage in a torn singlet with a moldering cigar in his teeth and shaking his hair! A special commission at the Ministry of Culture was convoked to discuss these extraordinary circumstances. Of course, the culture figures were upset, but they had to dismiss the new-sprung rocker from teaching. Ironically, Kusturica couldn’t play musical instruments properly back then: he chose a bass guitar only because there were fewer strings on it. He was admitted to the group mostly because he had bought a guitar and an amplifier for the band. However, the reputation of an outcast has stuck to the most famous Yugoslavian film director since then. “I adore outcasts. Their lives and minds are clear, almost childlike. They do not participate in our programmed life”.

If you are an outcast, you can dress at your own sweet will. You can meet with journalists, sipping sluggishly on canned soup. You can give a bonk on the head to your adult son in front of the cameras. You can even produce the Biorevolution fruit juices featuring Fidel’s, Saddam’s, Tito’s and your own portraits on bottle labels. Not politically correct? You can retort that political correctness is an idiocy, and you have read too many smart books to see the world through the eyes of a couple of biased TV companies. It is important to surprise people before they twirl a finger at their temple. And surprise he does.

Balkan’s Era

At the age of seventeen, leaving behind his tormenting doubts, Emir Kusturica chose the camera over the ball. Choosing a movie career and leaving professional soccer, there was nobody to give him a cue that, at the turn of the century, and in his particular case (given his Slavic straightforwardness and his personal nature of a straight shooter), athletic battles on mowed lawns would be safer and cheaper for him.

As in the case with most of his fellow-countrymen, he did not notice at what particular moment the motley Yugoslavian puzzle flew apart, into pieces of torn paper, when the united small community of his yard turned into an unstable conglomerate of ethnic and religious groups. Who decided that these groups should have it out immediately? The Cold War that allowed the country to live well, balancing between the contradicting interests of its neighbors, was over, and the fight for a new political platform, as it had often happened in the Balkan heat, resulted in a real ‘hot’ war in the country. Nobody could remain on the sidelines.

Kusturica’s family legacy was complex. They were Slavic by blood, Muslims with Orthodox Christian roots by confession, Communists by his father’s career. Their only son did not want to decide in which of these hypostases he would live. He insisted on ‘remaining a Yugoslav’—even when this country disappeared from the map. History eliminated his motherland, and he was fighting history alone.

In 1993, in the heat of the political battles, Emir Kusturica threw a glove at Voislav Sheshel, a Serbian ultranationalist, and generously let Sheshel choose the weapon. The fatal meeting was to take place in Belgrade’s central square at noon. Sheshel didn’t show up: he said he was not seeking Dantes’ laurels and was unwilling to be found guilty of an artist’s murder. Next time the ‘eternal Yugoslav’ resolved to do without the oldworld politeness. After an argument at the Belgrade Cinema Festival, he started a fight with another nationalist, Neibosh Pakich. Mrs. Pakich, who rushed to save her husband, determined the outcome of the battle. It was embarrassing to fight a woman, and Kusturica was heavily hit with a purse on the head.

He failed to become a Yugoslav. Just like in any other conflict, the principle of ‘who is not with us is against us’ worked well in Sarajevo and Belgrade. Serbians disliked Kusturica for being a Muslim, and Bosnians, for being a bad Muslim. Who are you with, masters of culture and art? The answer had to be clear. Any attempts at unbiased analysis just poured oil into fire. None of the belligerent camps forgave The Underground movie to the film director. The Bosnian Muslims were particularly hurt. Or, perhaps, they had better chances for revenge, since Kusturica’s house and his parents were in Sarajevo, Bosnia.

“My country’s geographical location is such that the winds of the Big History just can’t miss it. The Great Silk Way and Cotton Way from the West to the East passed through it; it was the eastern periphery of the Roman Empire. During WWII, we were on the Germans’ way to oil. It’s like building a house on a busy roadway. All those passing by try to destroy it.”

A la guerre comme a la guerre. Kusturica’s house was used by the Foundation of Bosnian Writers and then burnt down. His father was unable to deal with that and succumbed soon to a heart attack, and his old mother had to flee to Montenegro. Emir publicly announced to the non-existing country that he would never return to Sarajevo.

Man from Nowhere

It happened at the Nice Airport in May 1997. Emir Kusturica entered the waiting lounge and saw Francis Ford Coppola. The attending journalists (there were many of them, as the Cannes Festival had just ended) instantly saw the prominence of the event. Over the entire history of Cannes, there were only four film directors who had won the Cannes’ Golden Palm Branch twice. And here were two of them meeting by chance in the presence of TV cameras.

The cameras were turned on. Kusturica approached Coppola and rendered honors: he actually felt pietism to the classic. He introduced himself. The U.S. cinema master, without changing his poise, asked: “Where are you from?” “I’m from Yugoslavia”. “Are you from Belgrade?” “I came from Belgrade but I was born in Sarajevo”. “I was in Yugoslavia a long time ago. I remember it was in 1962. I drove from Belgrade to Dubrovnik, of course, before that horrible war. It was a wonderful trip. Truly nice people used to live there.”

During that ridiculous small talk, when Kusturica was standing, slumping awkwardly, in front of Coppola reclining in an armchair, he realized that the great American director knew nothing about Kusturica and was sure he was speaking to one of his fans.

“Excuse me please. Living in the U.S.A., you might have had no chance of seeing my movies. In 1995, I brought a movie about war to Cannes and won the Golden Palm Branch. The movie is called The Underground. I would be happy to send a copy to you.”

The scene was broadcast on French television. Europe sneered and boiled over this incident: this episode was a live illustration, a metaphor of relations between the U.S.A. and Europe. The French finally agreed that Coppola was a fine fellow—at least he knew where Yugoslavia was. Another American in his place could have easily put Dubrovnik down for a mustard brand. Kusturica made his personal conclusion out of the incident: “When I got my first award in Venice many years ago a newspaper wrote: ‘the winner is a nobody living nowhere’. Nothing has changed since then.” He brought home statuettes of different shapes and significance virtually from all festivals he took part in. But it happened only in Europe—Western, Southern and Eastern. America has never discovered him.

American Tragedy

Milos Forman was the first person to invite the Yugoslavian star to the U.S. in 1985. Forman chaired the very Cannes jury that adjudged the prize to Daddy on a Business Trip. With Forman’s reference, Kusturica went to New York to teach film direction at the Columbia University. There, in the U.S., he shot his strangest movie, Arizona Dreams, starring Johnny Depp and Fay Danaway, based on a student’s scenario.

But the participation of American actors did not save the movie, even though Depp, impressed by working with the ‘Balkan Fellini’, said many times that if Kusturica were shooting a movie about a book shelf he [Depp] would be glad to play a dusting-off hand in it. Arizona Dreams was a box-office failure both in the U.S. and in Europe. That was Emir Kusturica’s first and final attempt at conquering the Hollywood. Several years spent in the country of equal opportunities were enough for the film director to grow to hate the U.S. with all of its democratic values.

For someone U.S.A. means money and hamburgers. But the bad thing is that now hamburgers do not mean the U.S.A. only. The enemy image is changing over time. Same as Kusturica used to fight nationalism previously, he is now fighting globalization.

True, in a global world, there is no difference between a Serbian and a Bosnian, or between a Serbian and a Dane, or a Bosnian and a Canadian. Democracy is shifting from the idea of equality to the idea of uniformity. In a global world, you see the same ads in any city of the world, the same food is sold at the supermarkets, movie goers munch the same popcorn watching the same movies made at a sterile Hollywood factory. There are no more Gypsies in the world of corporations and consumers; instead, a race between the refrigerators is underway. And nobody asks eternal questions, because they do not make any practical sense. “THEY do not see Romania or Serbia as cultural phenomena. THEY need countries where people go shopping on Sundays, just like they went to church in the 19th century, and do their shopping as a tight-knit family.”

There is nothing new in this logic. Wars for the markets have been waged since the exchange of goods came into being. The most expensive high-tech weapons are not more expensive than the money. I wish the peace-making operation had been entrusted to Kusturica. He had so many ideas regarding this. “Billions of dollars were sunk in this war. This money would be enough to send all Kosovo Serbians and Albanians to the Bahamas. There they would listen to reggae, sing, drink, kiss, make love and be happy. And then they would be able to get busy restoring their economy.”

Why not? Things like that happen in the movies.

When I got my first award in Venice many years ago a newspaper wrote: “the winner is a nobody living nowhere”

Gypsies Leave for the Mountains

The house in Sarajevo was burnt. There has never been a house in New York or Los Angeles. The house outside of Paris has never been perceived as his property. The house in Belgrade (the new Serbia made peace with Kusturica merely for the reason that he had remained an ideological enemy in the eyes of the new Bosnia) reminded him of war too much. The Yugoslav without Yugoslavia roamed between alien towns, like those Gypsies he used to feature in his movies.

Finally, he was scared by the prospect of dying somewhere on a plane, between the sky and the earth. And he resolved to create a homeland for himself—a homeland where he would be able to tend cows, when he eventually becomes disappointed in civilization and stops shooting the movies.

This paradise is called Kuestendorf after its founder. It is a high-altitude village on the Wet Mountain, 1,200 meters above the sea level, right at the border between Serbia and Bosnia. It takes three and a half hours to get there from Belgrade. The place is an artist’s dream: it’s beautiful and deserted. Life as a Miracle was shot around here. The railway specially built for the shooting (the entire movie is set around the railway) came in handy. It is hard to find any other traces of technological advancement in Kusturica’s village. Those who need advancement should go to the cities. Local residents see cities almost like Jean-Jacques Rousseau did: it’s a ganglion of evils, an infernal place, where all healthy basics of human life are lost. “Concrete under the feet became something as natural as grass. One might think the concrete is growing on its own!”

Kuestendorf is a concrete-free area. Moreover, all advertising is absolutely prohibited in this preserve. Buildings are made of wood only, as in medieval Serbian towns. Kusturica went on a hunt looking for ancient houses in his country and had them moved to the Wet Mountain. He designed, paid and drove in the nails—all by himself. He built an Orthodox Church of Sava using a special design, was baptized in it under the name of Nemanya, and now serves as a church warden there. He spends most of his free time there, just like Count Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana. He follows the example of the Russian country landlords. “Now I know why Russia has such a great literature: all of the authors worked in the countryside. It is impossible to create anything useful in the city.”

Only three people reside permanently in Kuestendorf, and each of them enjoys Emir’s complete trust. “Democracy does not suit me. Townspeople elect a mayor themselves in democratic countries, whereas I myself select residents of my village.”

They live as a commune. They make jam, dry fruits, mold crocks and go mountain-skiing. Students of independent views come to study to shoot movies, draw and compose music. Regular tourists are not admitted: you can get to Kuestendorf either by an invitation or by a previous agreement. But, for instance, Nikita Mikhalkov has visited the place. Last winter, Kusturica invited Mikhalkov to his own festival of students’ movies, the festival without red carpets.

The grand opening ceremony took place at a cemetery. Those present started with burying—in full compliance with the ritual—the worst (in their opinion) Hollywood movie ever, Die Hard 4, in a plain wooden coffin. Kusturica sported a red builder’s helmet at the ceremony. And Mikhalkov, by the way, showed up in a sports jacket, covering himself up with an ugly cashmere scarf to keep warm. And, to all appearances, he felt fine. Nobody asked him to change into a tuxedo.

Smoking is OK, or the No-Rules Show (Your Choice)

There is a hospital in Belgrade, or more precisely, an asylum. An experiment is held there. They show Emir Kusturica’s movies, by eight-day courses, to the patients and watch the results. No findings have been released so far; the doctors have not yet reported the effect of the magic art on the psychiatric patients. But it is known for a fact that none of the personnel has gone insane so far.

It is the author himself who observes the progress of the study with the greatest attention. They say Mozart’s music improves the condition of seven in ten mental patients. Kusturica suspects his movies should yield reasonably good results, too.

He calls that ‘feast treatment’. One critic said once that watching Kusturica’s movies is like for a non-drinker to watch other people drink themselves under the table. “Drink or don’t come to the party”, the director retorted. Why rob other people’s joy?

The same applies to music. An old unrealized idea is to play a concert with The No Smoking Orchestra at a prison. Let the criminals get a sniff of happiness—perhaps they will start mending their ways.

Kusturica made a ‘dazzling’ career in that orchestra over the last twenty years. He mastered two additional strings and shifted from a bass guitar to an acoustic guitar. His musical contribution is not very conspicuous though against the general background. Vocalist Nele Karajlich and virtuoso Dejan Sparavalo with his violin give a more powerful show. But should a really cool guy be fussy? When others rush like mad on the stage encouraging the groupies to strip, Emir the Magnificent stays in place, never stopping to suck on his slaking cigar that he lights up at least ten times during the concert.

This cigar is a stumbling block for the inviting party. Fire safety rules must be observed when acting on stage. But as long as the orchestra is called No Smoking, Kusturica refuses to perform without a cigar. And the rules had to be dumped.

“But what about No Smoking?” the organizers keep asking for the tenth time. They would be better off not asking. “On the one hand, we are an orchestra that does not smoke cigarettes, on the other hand, an orchestra that smokes, but not only cigarettes, and thirdly, an orchestra that smokes, but not the cigarettes. Did I make myself clear? Or do you want to hear it again?”

And not a word is said about smoking jackets. Everything is clear with them. In fact, how do you hide a firework in a case? Firemen will certainly find it objectionable.

Cigar Clan  6'2008  vol.1

TEXT: ELENA KARPUKHINA

PHOTO: CORBIS