September 23–30, 1999

movie shorts

Black Cat, White Cat

Emir Kusturica, whose Underground (1995) stirred controversy for being pro-Serb, follows up with this apolitical story of love and chaos among the gypsies. With a boisterous pace which often threatens to spill over into hysteria, Black Cat is a tale of mixed-up marriages and failed capers whose mostly nonprofessional cast also includes Underground’s Srdjan Todorovic and Wounds’ Branka Katic. Too extreme to inspire mixed reactions, Black Cat is a love-it or hate-it proposition; either you buy into its celebration of the joy of life or it comes across as grating, forced and overbearing. There’s something about Kusturica’s insistence on the gypsies’ unspoiled love of life, the way he takes in every missing tooth and leathery face, that seems at once adulatory and patronizing; they’re simple folk, he seems to think, not bothered with our sophisticated concerns. (And the movie requires an "our" to work.) Where a movie like Gadjo Dilo could celebrate the more properly named Romany people’s ferocious appetites along with their vulgarity and vagabondage, Kusturica seems almost perversely insistent on never letting the tone diverge from the antic.

—Sam Adams