無論再怎麼絞盡腦汁，我應該都寫不出艾米爾庫斯杜力卡作品帶給我的奇異與瘋狂感受……。
記得大約是十年前，王志成曾在工商時報上用「瘋狂、偉大」兩個形容詞來讚美《地下社會》，我覺得非常合適。
要好好靜下來寫一篇《生命是個奇蹟》實在蠻困難的，要寫出我對艾米爾如滔滔江水般的景仰也不容易，所以，姑且把以下的文字當成我的隨筆札記。
至於艾米爾的電影，總之就是——去電影院看就對了！
˙很久很久以前…
很久很久以前，當我還很小的時候，曾經在高雄的電影院看到《流浪者之歌》的預告片。那時，我就自己在心裡打定注意，非要看到這部電影不可。終於，我在年代發行的錄影帶裡首度見識到艾米爾的魔法。
很久很久以前，我透過三映的盜版錄影帶見識了《爸爸出差時》，也很訝異居然能在衛視西片台看到《亞利桑納夢遊》，而在真善美戲院那個爛銀幕看瘋狂又偉大的《地下社會》，那種興奮與激動更是十年來絕無僅有的。那時，拼命在台北各大唱片行蒐購哥倫布雷高維克的OST，當好不容易買到《爸爸出差時》OST那一剎那，心中可是暗自得意國內還沒幾個人認識這號老兄哩。
很久很久以前，在SUN MOVIE還沒有倒台以前，曾經播過艾米爾庫斯杜力卡的五小時完整版《流浪者之歌》。原來除了國際播映的135分鐘戲院版以外，還有在塞拉耶佛電視台播映的迷你影集版。後來SUN MOVIE陸續播了艾米爾的處女作《你還記得杜莉貝爾嗎？》以及完整三小時版的《爸爸出差時》（國際電影版只有兩小時多一些）。
《你還記得杜莉貝爾嗎？》曾獲威尼斯處女作金獅獎，描述六０年代一個賽拉耶佛平凡家庭中一個青澀少年的純真往事，那種雲淡風清的氣味很有台灣新電影時期侯導的的《風櫃來的人》味道。摘下1985年金棕櫚的《爸爸出差時》，從十歲少男的角度來看政治與家庭的關係，爸爸原來是被共產黨以莫須有罪名抓去勞改（被情婦背判密告），出差只是媽媽安慰男孩的話。在這部作品裡，艾米爾的作者色彩也逐漸鮮明起來，如披著白紗的新娘、結尾總是闔家團圓的歡慶大和解式場景及他對電影的膜拜（本片中小男孩的哥哥很愛看電影）…，這些元素在他日後作品中將會一再出現。
獲頒1989年坎城最佳導演獎的《流浪者之歌》，講述吉普賽少男皮漢短暫的一生，男主角皮漢之前在《爸爸出差時》片中演愛電影的哥哥，到了《地下社會》則是女主角半瘋的瘸腿弟弟，很可惜他在現實生活中已自殺身亡（IMDB資料）。《流浪者之歌》同時也是艾米爾與配樂家哥倫布雷高維克的第一次合作，可惜《地下社會》成了這對搭檔的絕響。之後，艾米爾的電影由他自己當貝斯手的「無煙地帶」樂團負責配樂（其實《你還記得杜莉貝爾嗎？》也是這個樂團配樂的）。《流浪者之歌》藉由片頭、片中、片尾三場婚宴，巧妙地鋪成一脈呼應，無論是那倏地飄起來的頭紗、如夢似幻的吉普賽魔法，還是皮漢的寶貝火雞、阿媽的魔法紅球、甚至箱子一動一動的突梯怪異（小孩或火雞躲在裡面）…，當鏡頭無意中帶到奧森威爾斯的圖像時，當白衣新娘就理所當然地飛起來的剎那，我想，《流浪者之歌》注定永遠會是我心中影史十大佳作之一。那種奇異、濃郁、魔幻的哀傷，在五小時完整版中，不但沒有被稀釋，反而還變本加厲喔（戲院版幾乎只剪接第一跟第四、五小時而已）。
艾米爾趁著赴美當客座教授，順便拍了首部英語發音電影《亞利桑納夢遊》，卡司包括強尼戴普、費唐娜薇、以及我最愛的獨立電影天后莉莉泰勒，那年的柏林影展贏家是李安的《喜宴》，不過《亞利桑納夢遊》也很爭氣地拿下特別銀熊獎。儘管比不上艾米爾其他作品，但這部片的魔法色彩同樣濃厚迷人，一場向《北西北》致敬的戲尤其令我難忘。
1995年，《地下社會》以雷霆萬鈞之勢擊退勁敵《尤里西斯生命之旅》及《以祖國之名》，艾米爾二度摘下金棕櫚。電影裡的寓言世界，現實中的政治情境，讓讓艾米爾飽受輿論圍剿，甚至公開表示為此對電影圈失望，不再拍片。《爸爸出差時》的風流爸爸米奇因為風流而遭受政治迫害，到了《地下社會》，他搖身一變成為為愛成立「地下社會」，矇騙革命同志二十年的投機份子。米奇在《爸爸出差時》曾對迫害他的人說：「我可以遺忘，但無法原諒」；到了《地下社會》，遭他陷害的好友阿黑則對他說：「我可以原諒，但無法遺忘」。這是否象徵著時隔十年，艾米爾的人生觀也變了？
新娘的頭紗依舊飛呀飛的、戲中戲既是艾米爾對電影本身的致敬，也不忘犀利地嘲諷真實與虛構的差異。艾米爾把「死亡」、「地下」及「水」三元素合一，讓電影裡的死亡充滿了寂靜與淒美。於是，投井自盡的新娘宛若人魚般牽著溺斃的未婚夫游向遠方…，然後，所有死去的角色在片尾重新登場齊聚長桌同樂，忽然，他們腳下的土地分裂了，這是神蹟嗎（就是這個結尾，從此打心底相信：全世界只有艾米爾有能力把馬逵斯的《百年孤寂》影像化）？這令我想起《亂世兒女》結尾的一段話：「此刻，無論男女老少，他們全都平等了」。
˙And Then…
1999年，嚷著不再拍片的艾米爾總算食言，推出遊戲小品《黑貓白貓》。這部片再探吉普賽題材，輕薄短小、十足討喜，照例再拿下一座威尼斯銀獅（導演）獎。片尾仍有一場婚禮大混戰，這回加入強盜，殺手，侏儒，巨人…，「輕」得宛如一頁童話短篇。除了配樂，攝影也由長期合作的Vilko Filac換成盧貝松長期合作的法籍攝影師Thierry Arbogast（他也因本片而入圍當年歐洲影展的最佳攝影）。
接著，艾米爾推出另一部遊戲之作——他的首部紀錄片《巴爾幹龐克》，記錄艾米爾跑了二十年的樂團「無煙樂團」的團員生活及表演記實。原來在《黑貓白貓》裡跑上跑下的樂團就是「無煙樂團」呀！迥異於稍嫌做作的《樂士浮生錄》，「無煙樂團」延續艾米爾一貫的瘋癲狂妄調調（還有點DOGMA的感覺），艾米爾深刻寫真他那群二十年來如一的樂友，還包括他幾年前新加入的貝斯手兒子史特伯庫斯度力卡！感覺上，艾米爾真的就是艾米爾，戲裡戲外如一，紀錄片中流露的瘋癲本色確實和他的電影情調頗為一致。
還記得嗎，艾米爾在每部戲中都還會安排一個角色上吊，而且常都死不了，唯一成功的是《地下社會》裡二度上吊的動物園管理員。飾演動物園管理員的演員叫Slavko Stimac，他是艾米爾的處女作《你還記得杜莉貝爾嗎？》的男主角。二十年後，昔日的小男生早成了中年歐吉桑，艾米爾的最新作品《生命是個奇蹟》的男主角就是他。
《生命是個奇蹟》證明艾米爾才氣如昔，一貫的癲狂中見偉大。會流淚的驢、吃人的熊、恰北北的貓、黏人的狗…，這次還多了一個超級甜美的金髮尤物，還是有飛行，甚至連醫院裡的邂逅都令人眩暈得像一場愛的墜機。因戰亂而起的愛情，隨著和平而被迫結束。也許政治不再是最重要的唯一，所以這位狂兄斥資在山上打造屬於他的烏托邦，只為了好好說一段甜美的愛情故事，因為，無論怎樣的生命，都是一場奇蹟。
好吧，就用以下這篇有趣的訪談來幫這篇散漫的札記作結。
(‘I will not cut my film’全文張貼於下)
《生命是個奇蹟》在英國上映時，差點因為片中出現幾秒鐘的死鴿子畫面遭電檢伺候。看看艾米爾的回應，粗魯直率得可愛…。去他的英國！一隻塞爾維亞死鴿子干天殺的英國啥事啊？
‘I will not cut my film’
Emir Kusturica has just finished writing his letter to the censor. “I will not cut my film because, because, because … because of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” “What do you think?” he asks me. I tell him that as an argument it has a certain economy and elegance, but it might not be the most practical of approaches. “I don’t care,” he says. “That shithead is driving me nuts. He is messing with my sleep.”
The British censor has asked him to remove a scene from his new film, Life Is a Miracle – a typically full-blooded romance set against the backdrop of the Bosnian war – in which a cat pounces on a dead pigeon. Kusturica had thought it a reasonable metaphor for how idealists and innocents are easy prey for calculating big beasts in times of conflict.
The offending shot lasts of all of two seconds and is about as disturbing as an episode of the Teletubbies. But the British censor said no and Kusturica, one of the greatest film directors in the world, is so flummoxed and upset that he is considering pulling the film from the UK altogether.
I beg him not to. “You don’t realise what an emotive issue pigeons are in England,” I say, with all the plausibility I can muster. “I am not cutting my film for this jerk,” he insists. “Was he brought up by pigeons or something? I love Ken Loach and your football and your working class, but I do not believe the great English culture is going to be undermined by one eastern European cat.
“I just don’t get it. The pigeon was already dead, we found it in the road. And no other censor has objected. What is the problem with you English? You killed millions of Indians and Africans, and yet you go nuts about the circumstances of the death of a single Serbian pigeon. I am touched you hold the lives of Serbian birds so dear, but you are crazy. I will never understand how your minds work.”
The workings of the undeniably brilliant mind of Emir Kusturica, the only director other than Francis Ford Coppola to have won the Cannes Palme d’Or twice, can be equally unfathomable. Stories of Kusturica are legend. Of his gonzo love for guns, how he likes to fire off a few hundred rounds before breakfast to get the juices going, of the controlled anarchy of his sets, awash with goats, geese, Gypsy bands and explosives, and how he works his crews to the point of lunacy. On Life Is a Miracle, a sprawling Zhivago of a love story, he shot for 12 full nights in the small city of Cacek and didn’t use a second of the footage.
Kusturica is a walking morass of contradictions: a Sarajevan “Muslim” whom many Bosnians accuse of abandoning his city at its hour of greatest need to side with the Serbs. And yet Kusturica was a fearless critic of Milosevic. He challenged one of his most blood-drenched henchmen to a public duel in Belgrade and squared up to a still more grisly Serb supremacist in the street.
Like his great films – Underground, Time of the Gypsies, When Father Was Away on Business and Black Cat, White Cat – he is passionate, unpredictable and hilarious: you can see why he drives himself and the people around him to madness, and why they always forgive him for it. He has an irresistible mix of bravery, warmth and vulnerability. Kusturica does not have fans as much as followers, who turn out in their thousands all over the world to his concerts when this bear of a man takes his Balkan “punk” band, the No Smoking Orchestra, on the road. But nothing could have prepared even them for what Kusturica has done now.
I turn up in Belgrade as the thermometer sinks south of -20 degrees. “Come to my village,” he demands. “I have something to show you.” Three thousand feet up on Tara mountain the next morning, the full effect of his latest piece of “inspired lunacy” sits under 2ft of snow. Kusturica has sunk himself deep into debt, spending more than £1m to build a pastoral paradise, his own version of Plato’s republic, in one of Europe’s last great peasant redoubts.
“This is my Utopia,” he declares. “I lost my city [Sarajevo] during the war, now this is my home. I am finished with cities. I spent four years in New York, 10 in Paris, and I was in Belgrade for a while. To me now they are just airports. Cities are humiliating places to live, particularly in this part of the world. Everything I earn now goes into this.”
What started as a couple of salvaged traditional wooden houses 18 months ago, on a bluff above the spectacularly beautiful Mokra Gora valley in western Serbia, has mushroomed into a modern take on the great monastery-universities of the middle ages. The village is equipped with a library, Serbia’s most advanced cinema and, most incongruously of all, an underground basketball arena – a tribute to the three world championships won by the former Yugoslavia. For Kustendorf, as he calls the place, is also a hymn to Serbian cultural achievement and traditional living – a kind of cultural Alamo, as a country that has been cut off from the world by war and sanctions opens itself up to the gentle mercies of globalisation.
“I am making a stand here. I want to do something constructive. In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernise, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. Since they don’t have experience of the west, they even believe that western shit is pie.” Given that the prophets of the free market in Serbia often tend to be the same gangsters, war profiteers, smugglers and chancers that Kusturica lampoons in his films, you can see his logic.
Kusturica is even planning a film as a part of his crusade against consumerism, where the daughter of a prostitute flees the city with a country boy. “They say that I am a conservative, but I am not. I want there to be an alternative, to have other options rather than just this one authoritarian, corporate model. To me there has been a tectonic change in the world and corporate control has become the new bolshevism. I know it is crazy, but I want to create a place where people can come in an organised way to think differently, to think their own thoughts.”
His model for this Balkan Fitzcarraldo is Chilander, the great Serbian monastery on the Greek holy mountain of Athos, which kept Slavonic scholarship alive in the dark ages, though it is not clear that even he knows what he will end up with. Just like his films, there’s a great deal of extemporising. He has laid out and built 25 houses already, using his own idiosyncratic rules of classical proportion involving a set of ropes and a great deal of guesswork, “like the ancient Greeks did”.
Yet this seat of learning will soon also have its own ski slope, and he is contemplating building another more secluded house for himself now that hundreds of his fans have begun to descend on the place at weekends. “The original monastery house in which I planned to spend the rest of my life is not working out. People come and you have to offer hospitality. Sometimes it’s a bit like being in a glass cage.” Even on the day I was there, he was stopped four times in the snow by visitors wanting to talk and have their photos taken with him.
Yet there is no doubting the sincerity of Kusturica’s vision. He describes the Damascene moment when he decided to build the village like a celestial visitation. “One day when I was shooting I noticed a shaft of light hit the hillside. ‘There I will build a village,’ I thought.” But the most jaw-dropping thing of all, given that Kusturica is descended from several generations of Bosnian Muslims, is that the centerpiece of the place is an orthodox church dedicated to the 13th-century scholar Sava, the patron saint of Serbia. What would his late father, Murat, have thought of that? “My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. OK, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks.”
The war, and his despairing attempt to cling to the debris of the old Yugoslavia, still casts a long shadow on his work. He insists he didn’t choose sides, and it was his refusal to do so that made him a pariah in Sarajevo, a city that he clearly loves but which he probably cannot return to. Mokra Gora is about as close as you can be in Serbia to Sarajevo without crossing the border. Even his house looks out over the mountains to Bosnia. It is hard not to see him as a man inching his way home. The war mostly passed this place by. Shepherds in sheep-pelt coats still make their own cheese, flowery rakia and smoked sausage.
The Muslim villages over the hills in the Drina valley were not so lucky. Many who refused to abandon their homes in 1992 were massacred. Plenty of Serbs died too, of course. Life Is a Miracle begins in the weeks before this idyll disintegrated and ends during the war when a Serb falls in love with a female Muslim hostage who is about to be exchanged for his own captured soldier son. It is based on a true story of torn loyalties, and Kusturica says it really hit home. The main character could almost be a cipher for him. Like thousands of others in the former Yugoslavia, Kusturica refused to believe that war was coming. “I couldn’t accept what was happening. I have dealt with it now. It no longer haunts me,” he insists, but you wonder. Much still rankles more than a decade on. He recounts the story of how an American journalist grilled him at Cannes when he made Underground, about why he hadn’t made a film attacking Milosevic. ” ‘Have you ever heard of metaphor?’ I asked him.”
He is now making a documentary about Diego Maradona, someone with whom he feels more than a little cosmic affinity. “I am very impulsive too – I know how it can drive you into the zone of madness.” We talk about that goal, the “hand of God”, and the church that sprang up in Buenos Aires to honour the footballer, the cult of Santa Maradona. “Most people only remember Maradona for the bad parts now,” he says. “But he was a genius, someone who lifted us and himself up to the level of the gods. When he said after he scored that goal that it was the hand of God, to me it really was. There are always motherfuckers queuing up to pull you down to earth. But we must fly occasionally, we all have to feel that joy or we are nothing.”
· Life Is a Miracle is released on March 11.