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PARTISAN REVIEW
Kusturica brilliantly exposes the incendiary tissue of lies and myths
that began with the war, were embalmed during the Tito era, and explod–
ed again when the Communist dictatorship foundered. To Kusturica, the
recent history of Yugoslavia defies the imagination, so he borrows freely
from Brecht and Fellini, from Surrealism and Expressionism, to try to do
justice to it. The film is so boisterous and noisy, so free and "irresponsi–
ble" in its treatment of a painful history that, as I write, it has yet to find
an American distributor, eighteen months after it won the Palme d'Or at
Cannes. Exactly how powerful it was came home to me as I went direct–
ly across town from Lincoln Center to a screening of Neil Jordan's film
Michael Collins.
Just as Kusturica traces the slaughter in Bosnia back to
1941, Jordan tracks the fratricidal divisions of Ireland to 1916, and even
focuses on a similar triangle of two militant friends and a woman, played
by Liam Neeson, Aidan Quinn, and Julia Roberts.
A surprisingly conventional film from the author of The
Crying Came,
Michael Collins
gamely props up all the heroic cliches so brilliantly
debunked in
Underground.
Both films project a long historical span, explor–
ing the roots, many decades back, of conflicts that still tear their nations
apart, nourished by myths they cannot let die. While the movie doesn't
exactly idealize terrorism and violence, it avoids facing up to the unpleas–
ant fact: that Michael Collins, revolutionary turned peacemaker, is killed
by the same young men he mobilized, the killers he trained, the forces he
let loose. Liam Neeson gives a strong performance as Michael Collins, but
it's a Hollywood impersonation, commanding but blank to the contradic–
tions of Collins's career. Neeson is unable to convey what is missing from
the script, as Alan Rickman somehow succeeds in doing in his droll and
lethal portrayal of Collins's great rival, Eamon de Valera.
Michael Collins
epitomizes the best kind of upholstered Hollywood
movie that is technically superb, visually sumptuous, dramatically shallow,
and morally obtuse. Where Egon Humer gives us history as scrupulous
memory and Kusturica turns history into absurdist cabaret, Jordan returns
us to history as dark heroic spectacle in the old commercial vein. Without
the more idiosyncratic personal visions on view each fall at the New York
Film Festival, that is virtually all there would be for us to see.
