Books, Arts & Manners: Compassionate Satire

Emir Kusturica, the 31-year-old Yugoslav film director, caused quite a stir by winning the grand prize at Cannes with what is only his second feature, When Father Was Away on Business. For once, the Cannes jury was right: This film deserves the accolade. And apropos of accolades, Kusturica told me that he doesn’t like tepid films; he wants a movie to hug you or slap you in the face. Father does both. It is a film of undaunted honesty and unswerving intelligence, borne aloft by humor, heartache, satire, and compassion—an unbeatable combination.

The movie is based on a number of true stories, combining the family experiences of both its director and its scenarist, the poet Abdulah Sidran. I found it indebted also to Milan Kundera’s novel (and film) The Joke, as Kusturica willingly admits: He spent five years at Prague’s famous film academy, where, shortly before, Kundera had taught, and admires the great novelist. In that novel, an innocent political joke has dreadful repercussions under a repressive regime that, axiomatically, has to be humorless. In Father, Mesa, a minor government functionary who travels and womanizes a lot, refuses to divorce his wife, Sena, as the gym teacher Ankica, his current mistress, would have him do. Mesa sees a political cartoon in the relatively liberal paper Politika, showing Marx writing at his desk and looking up for inspiration at a portrait of Stalin on his wall. We are in the late 1940s, when Yugoslavia is still paying official homage to Stalin while Tito is secretly jailing hard-core Stalinists.

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John Simon

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Emir Kusturica, the 31-year-old Yugoslav film director, caused quite a stir by winning the grand prize at Cannes with what is only his second feature, When Father Was Away on Business. For once, the Cannes jury was right: This film deserves the accolade. And apropos of accolades, Kusturica told me that he doesn’t like tepid films; he wants a movie to hug you or slap you in the face. Father does both. It is a film of undaunted honesty and unswerving intelligence, borne aloft by humor, heartache, satire, and compassion—an unbeatable combination.

The movie is based on a number of true stories, combining the family experiences of both its director and its scenarist, the poet Abdulah Sidran. I found it indebted also to Milan Kundera’s novel (and film) The Joke, as Kusturica willingly admits: He spent five years at Prague’s famous film academy, where, shortly before, Kundera had taught, and admires the great novelist. In that novel, an innocent political joke has dreadful repercussions under a repressive regime that, axiomatically, has to be humorless. In Father, Mesa, a minor government functionary who travels and womanizes a lot, refuses to divorce his wife, Sena, as the gym teacher Ankica, his current mistress, would have him do. Mesa sees a political cartoon in the relatively liberal paper Politika, showing Marx writing at his desk and looking up for inspiration at a portrait of Stalin on his wall. We are in the late 1940s, when Yugoslavia is still paying official homage to Stalin while Tito is secretly jailing hard-core Stalinists.