Love, writes CALEB STARRENBURG, takes center stage in Life is a Miracle: Serbian Emir Kusturica's Shakespearean, Fellini-esque – even Benigni-esque – spin on the Bosnian War.


A MORE appropriate title for Serbian director Emir Kusturica's Life is a Miracle (Zivot Je Cudo) might have been Love is a Miracle. The film is, in a very real sense, a contemporary retelling of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; a tale of star crossed lovers challenging insurmountable odds, set against the backdrop of war.

In Life is a Miracle, the year is 1992 and Luka (Slavko Stimac) is an engineer building a rail network to link a rural Bosnian town with tourism from nearby Serbia. His wife Jadranka (Vesna Trivalic) is a neurasthenic opera singer, and his son Milos (Vuk Kostic) is a footballer on the verge of professionalism.

Luka refuses to believe in the encroaching conflict. "Sensible people," he insists, will not go to war. When war does arrive, Jadranka disappears with a Hungarian musician (Nelle Karajlic) and Luka's son is taken hostage.

Luka is asked to guard a young Muslim nurse named Sabaha (Natasa Solak) until she can be exchanged for Milos. However, Luka falls in love with Sabaha, radically complicating matters.

Like Federico Fellini and the guy who did Alley McBeal, director/writer Emir Kusturica (The Time of the Gypsies, Underground, Black Cat, White Cat) depicts life in the extravagance of magical realism, where the allegorical and outlandish are commonplace. Who else would introduce a suicidal, lovesick donkey into their polemic?

In this sense, Life is a Miracle reveals a very different vision of the Bosnian War from the one CNN and the BBC presented in the early 90s. In fact, Kusturica displays an incredible contempt for the international media's interpretation of the conflict, portraying them as incompetent and self-serving.

While the film makes vague reference to the conflict's atrocities and the profiteering of Bosnia's political class, Kusturica is far more interested in demonstrating the disruptive impact of war on the innocent and their will to survive. At one point, Bosnian soldier Captain Aleksic (played by Kustrucia's son Stribor) makes the telling comment that death is easy, and life is the difficult part.

However, it is Kusturica's trademark exuberance and his sense of the whimsical that causes Life is a Miracle to marginally falter. We are often so busy processing Kusturica's sensory overload, including musical numbers, flying beds and dancing bears, that his rich tragicomic vision doesn't always grab hold. In a similar vein, despite terrific performances from his cast, his characters, who exist as caricatures, are somewhat difficult to engage with as human beings.

Above all this, Life is a Miracle is a movie about the absurdity of war and the will to endure. Kusturica challenges our expectations, presenting a reality that is enchanting and outlandish, yet at the same time, strangely akin to our own.