Promise Me This [2007]

Promise Me This, Kusturica’s follow-up to the magnificent and farcical political satire Life is a Miracle, can almost be considered as a companion piece. He further upped the madness, boisterousness and absurdist quotient in this deliriously crazy, cacophonic and carnivalesque film; however, unlike the terrific anti-war fable that the latter was, the political aspects here were largely incidental, and hence not central to the narrative of this amusing, uneven, over-the-top and deliberately ludicrous film. It opens at a remote village in the Serbian countryside whose tranquility is in contrast to the characters living there – a neurotic old man (Aleksandar Berček) with a love for weird tricks, his grandson Tsane (Uroš Milovanović) who loves peeping at his buxom teacher when she bathes, and who in turn is trying to seduce the deadpan grandfather while also being pursued by a man obsessed with winning her. Suddenly feeling that he’s about to die, the grandfather sends Tsane to the city with three tasks – sell their cow, buy an icon, and find a bride for himself. The last task, however, proves darn difficult for the naïve and bumbling teenaged kid – while he immediately falls in love with a matured young woman – the pretty, sassy and spunky Jasna (Marija Petronijevic), he also gets unlikely comrades in the form of a pair of wacky, gun-toting brothers who couldn’t be more unlike physically (one of them played by the director’s son Stribor Kusturica), and antagonizes an absolutely lunatic gangster (the fabulous Miki Manojlović – he’d appeared earlier in Kusturica’s When Father was Away on Business and Underground) who runs a massive brothel with his demented gang of thugs and dreams of bringing the World Trade Centers to Serbia.

Director: Emir Kusturica
Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Romantic Comedy
Language: Serbian
Country: Serbia