Word: malik
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SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Malik rises slowly from his bed, his eyes half closed. With arms outstreched, as if holding a marionette, he walks down the hall, past the bathroom, and out the front door. In post-World War II Yugoslavia, sleepwalking was a very good way to escape from reality...
Able to walk the fine line between a bland documentary and an overdone "epic saga," Kusturica tells the story of a Sarajevo family's struggle during the consolidation of the Yugoslavian state under Tito. The story is told in part through the eyes of Malik, the son of an aspiring Communist Party officer. Malik's Father's "business trip" (as a forced laborer) begins when a political cartoon appears in the party newspaper. The cartoon shows Karl Marx writing at a desk, with a picture of Tito on the wall behind him. Father--known as Mesa in the film--mentions...
Kusturica is prudent in his use of Malik as commentator, offering a refreshing break from films like Stephen Spielberg's, which are told almost completely through the eyes of children. The part of the objective observer is played by Malik's bespectacled older brother, Mirza, who concerns himself solely with the outcomes of events. His detached perspective suggests that of the filmmaker, a suggestion further enhanced by his fascination with cameras, and with what little cinema he can find in backward Sarajevo...
...familiar with the circumstances of the CIA funding of this conference, but it is unfortunate that I was not informed of it until two days ago. As it happens I had received Professor Malik's paper only the day before and had not yet read it or prepared my comments, so I cannot complain of having been put to extensive labor. I would like to think that my comments would have come out pretty much the same. But it is the case that a CIA connection of any sort can severely compromise one's scholarly reputation, certainly in India...
...recently, "There were a lot of sleepwalkers in Yugoslavia back then." But its viewpoint is applicable beyond Eastern Europe. It suggests that life is a series of small revolutions against, and accommodations to, the prevailing power, whether ideological, social, sexual or parental; and that flight into a dreamscape like Malik's may be the only sensible solution. The little boy's somnambulism leads him to a consuming first love, to the top of a mountain and, in the final shot, into delicious complicity with the viewer. In the mind, or in movies, we can all be rebels...