October 7, 1999
Web posted at: 11:51 a.m. EDT (1551 GMT)

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- Breaking rules by definition must be the easiest job in the world. If a film director with an outwardly surreal bent has enough pull to secure financing for his head-scratching projects, he gets to plaster absurdities across the huge canvas of a movie screen. If no one can decipher the end result, mission accomplished.

If the film is technically masterful, people will applaud the filmmaker's unwillingness to communicate as a more profound form of communication; if it doesn't make sense, it makes sense. This is like a star halfback running in the wrong direction and fumbling the ball on purpose.

Luis Buñuel ("That Obscure Object of Desire," 1977) buttered his bread with this idea for 50 years, and now it's Yugoslavian director Emir Kusturica's turn.

Kusturica has always displayed a gift for dreamlike imagery. His memorable 1989 film, "Time of the Gypsies," is crawling with almost mystical visions, but you can still tell what's going on. Not so with his 1998 film, "Black Cat, White Cat."

His always-busy frame now is crawling with ridiculous minutiae, everything from jugglers to the seemingly endless flocks of geese that tail the main characters wherever they go. Kusturica makes Terry Gilliam ("Brazil," 1985; "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," 1988) seem like a minimalist.

What you get out of "Black Cat, White Cat" will depend solely on your tolerance for loud, sweaty, often grating nonsense. Kusturica is back in Gypsy territory again, this time following Matko (Bajram Severdzan) and his son (Florijan Ajdini) as they bicker, lie and trade their way across a landscape that resembles reality only in fleeting glimpses. The opening scene sets the warped tone, and things get progressively out-of-alignment from there.

Matko -- who's playing poker against himself while catching the breeze from a homemade fan powered by a hamster on running on a wheel -- hops on a small boat with his son. The son has fried a pan of eggs, and the two battle over who gets to eat them as they approach a larger boat passing their home. When they reach the other boat, they barter with the captain over how much they'll pay for the washing machine he's selling. Then, Matko tries to lower the washer into his dinghy all by himself, but he ends up dropping it into the drink. It gurgles down and away, symbolic of any hope you had for being able to stand the picture itself.

From there on, much of the film deals with a get-rich-quick scheme cooked up by Matko. He tries to steal a train full of petrol, but the plan eventually backfires elaborately. One of the criminals, for reasons that are vague at best, evens the score by making Matko's son marry a girl he doesn't know.

Chickens run everywhere. A pig is repeatedly shown eating an abandoned car at a deserted roadside. There are tons and tons and tons of geese. Everywhere Matko and his son go, they have to maneuver around squawking birds and animals. Entire scenes are shouted over the cacophony of barnyard critters going berserk, evidently just to drive the audience out of its mind.

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Some of this, admittedly, is sort of funny. But once you get the idea that anything goes, watching the film becomes a terrible chore. The non sequiturs that populate the fringes of, say, a Monty Python film, are the very content of this one. There's no slow build-up to insanity; Kusturica hits the ground screeching and never looks back.

It might be worth watching on video, where the fast-forward button will do the editing job the director apparently didn't have time for. The pause button will also help you take in the barrage of detail that flashes by in every scene, not that it'll help you figure out what it all means.

At the very least, you'll be able to tell your friends you've seen an obese, singing woman pull a nail out of plank with her ... um ... her butt.

A couple cases of beer might help.

Maybe "Black Cat, White Cat" is some kind of cryptic political allegory, but it's gotten lost in the wall-to-wall hysteria. Then again, maybe not. There's a heavy reliance on bodily functions, sweat and violence. There are geese. There's a corpse in the attic, packed in ice. There's a unique approach to nail removal that you'll never see on "This Old House." Rated R. 135 minutes, which, if you're not in the mood, makes it 134 minutes too long.