Underground (Serbian: Подземље / Podzemlje), is a 1995 epic satirical black comedy war film directed by Emir Kusturica, with a screenplay co-written with Dušan Kovačević.
On the morning of 6 April 1941 in Belgrade, the capital of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, two bon vivants, Petar Popara, nicknamed Crni (Blacky) and Marko Dren, head home.
Encountering ruins and escaped animals from the zoo, he also runs into disconsolate Ivan carrying Soni, a baby chimp.
Blacky occasionally visits his mistress Natalija Zovkov who has been assigned to a special actors' labour brigade that is helping the city's rebuilding effort under German occupation.
Blacky shoots Franz in the chest (he survives) and, along with Natalija and Marko, reaches the river boat anchored outside Belgrade.
Blacky is captured by Germans and tortured in a hospital with electric shocks while Franz and Natalija visit her brother Bata there.
Marko and Natalija attend a ceremony to open a cultural center and unveil a statue of Petar Popara Blacky, who everyone thinks died, becoming a People's Hero.
With the help of his grandfather who is in on the con, Marko oversees the weapons manufacturing and even controls time by removing hours to a day so the people in the cellar think that only 15 years passed since the beginning of World War II instead of 20.
The filming of a state-sponsored motion picture based on Marko's memoirs titled Proleće stiže na belom konju (Spring Comes On A White Horse) begins above ground.
In a dreamlike sequence, Blacky, Marko, Vera and others re-emerge from underneath the water and are reunited at an outside dinner party on a small grass peninsula to celebrate Jovan's wedding.
The website's critics consensus reads: "Offering an insightful look at Communist Eastern Europe through the microcosm of a long friendship, Underground is an exhausting, exhilarating epic.
"[5] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 79 out of 100, based on 17 critics, indicating "generaly favorable reviews".
[6] In the New York Daily News, Dave Kehr lauded the film as "ferociously intelligent and operatically emotional,"[7] and Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called it a "sprawling, rowdy, vital film laced with both outrageous absurdist dark humor and unspeakable pain, suffering and injustice".
While acknowledging that "the politics of Underground have been assailed and dissected by international audiences", she feels that "this debate is largely specious as there's no hidden agenda to this robust and not terribly subtle tale of duplicity with Mr. Kusturica's central idea being a daringly blunt representation of political chicanery that fools an entire society, and of the corruption that lets one man thrive at the expense of his dearest friend".
[11] In her article "Europe (Un)Divided: How Peace Was Won and the War Never Lost in Wim Wender's Lisbon Story (1995) and Emir Kusturica's Bila Jednom Jedna Zemlja/Underground (1995)" for the Journal for Contemporary European Studies, Evelyn Preuss points out how the film critiques dominant Western ideologies by showing East and West as well as past and present in a continuity rather than divided or marked by caesuras.
Generally, the two viewed Kusturica as a "traitor who crossed over to the enemy side thus turning his back on his city, his ethnic roots, and his nation".
[16][17][18] Finkielkraut had not seen the film, but wrote in Libération "that offensive and stupid falsification of the traitor taking the palm of martyrdom had to be denounced immediately".
[22] Bosnian-American novelist Aleksandar Hemon criticized Underground in 2005, saying that it downplayed Serbian atrocities by "presenting the Balkan war as a product of collective, innate, savage madness.
[37] The court case thus continued with Kusturica's lawyer Branislav Tapušković presenting details of the film's financing sources, most of which were French production companies.