Underground

[Tim Johnson]

I saw Emir Kusturica's new film _Underground_ recently, and was struck by
the Pynchon similarities. Fantasy sequences, magic realism (of a sort);
characters playing actors playing themselves; the past, erm, made manifest
in the present; a sense of suffering ignored; a community travelling
underground along roads that link the major capitals of Europe; likeable
characters transforming, through the film's long historical scope, into war
criminals; rocket bombardment, both in World War II and the conflict in the
former Yugoslavia. Oh, and lots of music of a carnivalesque sort.

For me, the film had echoes also of The Wizard of Oz, Delicatessen, and
Apocalypse Now, all rolled into one.

I suppose this post neither has much of a point, nor requires any kind of
comment. It's simply that I left the cinema with a feeling of some
Pynchonian spectre, like the Eis Heilegen, or something, that I had to
express...

Tim