So hey, that film you always wanted, in which Monica Bellucci wrestles a bad CG snake on a minefield as exploding sheep rain down all around while nearby, 2-time Palme d’Or-winning director Emir Kusturica, playing a milkman with a broken leg, is saved when his best friend, a peregrine falcon, pecks out the right eye of the rogue ex-army commando trying to kill him, is here. Kusturica’s “On the Milky Road” is an exhausting, indigestion-inducing maximalist fairy tale that is part Aesop, part Looney Tunes, part Danielle Steele, and all Kusturica — beware of the term magical realism: there is nothing of the real world here. Desperately overfull of trinkets and knickknacks and cluttered background action, and all but void of topicality, relevance or insight, the film has been in the works for quite a while now — one imagines Kusturica tinkering with it ceaselessly in the garage like a Sunday hobbyist. Unveiling time must come, but with “On the Milky Road,” Kusturica throws back the sheet and we’re faced not with the immaculately restored vintage Rolls Royce we might have hoped for, but with a clanking, wheezing Rube Goldberg jalopy, all steam whistles and clockwork dials, backfiring and grinding its gears, belching smoke, noise and pointlessness.
It does, however, have an absolutely cracking opening, when for just a few minutes, that loopy, folksy Kusturican zaniness absolutely works. In a tiny cluster of farm buildings set in the picturesque Serbian countryside, sheep baa and cows moo and a flock of barking geese waddle by as two men drag a pig into a barn for noisy slaughter, emerging with buckets of blood that they empty into a stranded bathtub. The geese, seemingly inexplicably, jump into the bath and flap about, drenching themselves in gore, which all makes sense moments later when, amid a lot of other malarkey, we see a cloud of flies descend, and the geese get to snack on them for elevenses. Treasure this moment of Old Macdonald tomfoolery, because it’s arguably the last time any of the studied wackiness of the human or animal behavior has an actual reason behind it.
Contrary to first impressions, we’re not in some sort of bucolic 19th century idyll — incongruous helicopters roaring overhead and a nearby militia outpost, at which soldiers bicker and gossip, supremely unconcerned by the explosions and gunfire raining down all around, suggest that the film is actually set in the ’90s sometime during the Yugoslav Wars, inasmuch as it’s set any actual time at all. More than a recognizable historical period we’re in a fantasy Kusturicaville, that exists in such a permanent state of war that it has become the norm, and defiantly oddball rural life has grown in around it like weeds reclaiming an abandoned vehicle.
Kosta (Kusturica himself) is the milkman who journeys from the farm to the outpost delivering canisters of fresh milk via donkey, sheltering from the raining rubble under an umbrella, and usually accompanied by his “buddy,” a falcon whose beady eye surveys the terrain with proprietorial disdain. The farm, which for some reason has a large malicious mechanical clock as a feature, whose pendula can unconvincingly support the weight of one or several adults, is run by its aging matriarch and her daughter, the comely Milena (Sloboda Mićalović), a former gymnast with a propensity for entering and exiting rooms via somersault or cartwheel, who has a poster of Jennifer Beals in “Flashdance” on her wall and a wicked crush on Kosta. Milena’s brother is a scarred officer in the army, away at the front, but in his absence Milena arranges delivery of a wife, known only as The Bride (Monica Bellucci). The Bride settles in, but ruins Milena’s plans by falling for Kosta (who obviously reciprocates — she’s Monica Bellucci). Oh, and the beautiful newcomer also has a storied past, involving an obsessive general who murdered his own wife to be with her, which will bring tragedy to the whole enclave, even after the war ends.
That description barely scratches the surface of the many things that happen, but let’s leave it there because life is short (although ‘Milky Road,’ at 125 minutes, is long). In any case, this is less about events than fleeting moments and odd images: a chicken jumping up and down looking at its own reflection; a bear with a thorn in its paw; a musician with blowfish cheeks and flapping ears playing oom-pah-pah tunes on a length of plumber’s piping; a stained wedding dress floating down the river, empty of its Ophelia. The problem is there is no quality control: striking images that might have some resonance if allowed to breathe and mature, rub up against irritating slapstick or amateurish special effects, as though any frame that doesn’t have every corner and every plane crammed with quirk is an admission of failure.
Yet the film’s real failure, that the smokescreen of busyness cannot conceal, is its utter vacuity. Absent the socio-political subtext of “Underground” or “When Father Was Away on Business,” all “On the Milky Road” is really about is tragic love, and yet we feel neither the tragedy nor even the passion, because of the jumble of fantastical coincidences, magical interventions and ex-machina contrivances that it comprises. The fantasy works against any investment in the characters, because whenever a predicament threatens to actually attain some stakes, some unmotivated magic occurs, like the moment Kosta and The Bride, under siege by soldiers in a big hollow tree during a thunderstorm, elude their pursuers by floating up into the air and away. Or like the moment of panic and peril at the lip of a massive waterfall that dissipates instantly when a plummet to their presumptive deaths becomes instead a swoony, floaty embrace. Or any of the many moments in which nature — snakes, bees, sheep, birds, even wind — intervene to save the star cross’d duo from yet another sticky situation.
For all the fuss, “On the Milky Road” feels fusty, like a granny’s parlor, where the actual heirlooms are so inextricably jumbled up amongst the kitschy porcelain shepherdesses and carriage clocks, it all just looks like junk. And while Kusturica might find some wild Gypsy romance in the only really discernible idea it espouses — that a woman’s beauty has more destructive power than an ongoing, protracted war — that doesn’t stop it being utter twaddle, and a very slender thread onto which to hang so much aggressive whimsy. [C-]
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