Our next film takes place on:
Tuesday 8th January
Little Theatre
7.45pm

Black Cat, White Cat

Emir Kusturica/Yugo-Aus-Ger-Fra/1998/123 minutes

Chaos visits a wedding in a small Balkan village full of gangsters, cheats and liars. Emir Kusturica directs this carnivalesque romantic comedy

"Weddings and funerals don't mix", declares the incompetent blackmarketeer Matko in Black Cat, White Cat. Yet, during the extended wedding party sequence that makes up most of the film's second hour, death is (literally) never far away, as the bodies of two old men are kept on ice in the attic upstairs. Even the junk-addled official who presides over the final vows has mistakenly brought along "the register of deaths, not marriages". In Emir Kusturica's farcical fairy tale of family, fraud, fate and friendship, it turns out that marriage and death are just one of a number of unlikely pairings that make up the film's carnivalesque absurdity.

Young Zare Destanov has his eye on the free-spirited waitress Ida, but after his father Matko is cheated in one of his scams by the powerful gangster Dadan, Zare finds himself about to be married off to Dadan's diminutive sister instead as part of a deal to settle the family's huge debts. It seems that only grandpa Zarije Destanov and his old friend Grga Pitic can save the day, and these two irrepressible patriarchs prove not only to be a match for all the other scoundrels, swindlers and liars around them, but also more than capable of cheating death itself.

One person in Black Cat, White Cat is described as a "six-foot giant with hands like shovels", another as a "midget" just over a metre high. All the film's characters are exaggerations, whether it is the criminal who keeps cocaine hidden in a crucifix and likes to juggle hand grenades, the hard-drinking grandfather who is followed everywhere by a gypsy brass band, the near-blind godfather who endlessly rewatches the closing scenes of Casablanca , or the chanteuse with the Leningrad Cowboy quiff whose act climaxes when she extracts a nail from a wooden plank using only her ample behind. For in the little Romany village of Surduk on the bank of the Danube, exuberance, hyperbole and excess are a way of life, and it is difficult to know where the locals' tall tales end and reality begins, or even where the boundary lies between love and hate, life and death.

Two hours may sound overlong for what is essentially a spirited romantic comedy, but the lavish brand of magical realism that Kusturica has made his own in films like Time Of The Gypsies and Underground here ensures that each and every scene is richly saturated with colour, noise and incident - and with enough unhinged vitality to get everybody smiling. It is as though Four Weddings And A Funeral had been reimagined by Fellini with a cast of crazy Balkan rogues and a background chorus of farmyard animals. Cinema is seldom so hyperactively busy, deliriously charming or surreally humane.

Verdict
Watching Black Cat, White Cat is like gatecrashing a wild party - even if it is never quite clear who or what (apart from life itself) is being celebrated.

Channel4

Trivia

The film is cast mostly with non-professional Romany actors.

Co-writers Kusturica and Mihic had originally intended to make a documentary on Romany music, inspired by their previous collaboration on Time Of The Gypsies; but then a plot emerged, and thickened.

Chester Film Society is proud to announce that tickets are now available for our 2008 Social Evening.

We have booked the club rooms of the Grosvenor Rowing Club, situated on the Chester Groves, for our social evening - Saturday 9th February.

Your ticket price will include a professionally prepared (and substantial!) finger buffet and sweet with soft drinks.

Along with a selection of short films, games and spot prizes will ensure that you will have a night to remember. Please take this opportunity to come along and meet new friends. Bring a guest along as well!

The evening starts at 7.30pm and tickets are just £7.50 each. Only a limited number of tickets are available. Please book as soon as possible to avoid disappointment, and to help us plan for the evening. Last year we had a number of enquiries in the last week which was too late to hold the event. We look forward to seeing you on the evening.

Please email mike.graham@chesterfilmfans.co.uk if you need more information.

Please visit http://www.chesterfilmfans.co.uk/mailing_list/news_080106.htm for an online version of this issue.