Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

The background may be confusing to viewers unfamiliar with post-WWII Balkan history, but this was never (thankfully) meant to be a big-screen social studies lesson. The film is a sentimental (but never mawkish) drama of family life behind the Iron Curtain, as seen through the often glazed eyes of an eight-year old Yugoslav boy (prone to episodes of somnambulism) whose father is arrested for making a casual criticism of an editorial cartoon. Rather than taking potshots at easy political targets, director Emir Kusterica focuses instead on smaller, more intimate conflicts, recounting moments of family affection and bitterness with an understated humor transcending national and cultural borders.

This is yet another film where I had some problem figuring out many plot elements and character relationships, where some of the blame might rest on having to rely on subtitles. I also do not know much of the complicated history of Bosnia, so that didn't help me to understand the context, either.It took me at least half the film to figure out all of the character relationships, and this is really a "slice of life" story--albeit set, in the 1950s, in what's apparently a confusing, changing, communist political landscape. But it's important to know each character's relation to other characters as well as a bit of their personal backgrounds and histories with each other--character development is of primary importance, but I'm not sure it was always fleshed-out as it needed to be.It also didn't help (as it never does in any film) that a few characters looked very similar, and at least one has a major change of appearance, and a major change back. For example, I never was completely clear on whether the woman on the train with the father at the beginning, with whom he was having an affair (he was quite the philanderer), was also the female pilot in the airshow, and also the gym teacher, who was also his brother-in-law's wife. And the reason that the father went away to some kind of prison work camp was never very clear to me either. Ostensibly it was because he made a remark about a cartoon in a newspaper, but that seems ridiculous (although maybe that's more realistic than I can imagine and is part of the point), and I kept thinking that the real reason was for the brother-in-law to get back at him for the affair with the brother-in-law's wife.In any event, despite my confusion, this is a fairly good film, with great performances. The family's youngest son is at times a narrator and is featured in a poignant subplot, but Otac na sluzbenom putu would have benefited by making him even more of the focus and point of view.

I was so happy to find this film, as movies about life behind the Iron Curtain are very few and far between here in the US. It was a very interesting slice of life in the former Yugoslavia and featured the story of a man who was sent away for "anti-Communist" remarks. The poor sap, it seems, made a very innocent and harmless comment and because of this he was sent away from his loving family for a couple years for re-education and forced labor. All of this was very interesting. The problem for me was that although you felt for his family, you had a hard time caring for the man because beneath it all he was a major jerk who spent much of the movie being repeatedly unfaithful to his very loving wife. This, unfortunately, served to really blunt the impact of the film. While it COULD be said this humanized the story and made it more complex, I really felt disappointed by this plot choice.

This could well be subtitled What Did You Do In The Peace, Daddy, given that a major element is the tomcatting of Malik's old man about five or six years prior to the conflict or, to put it another way, when that country between Italy and Greece was still called Yugoslavia. The film works on many levels but unfortunately several are unaccessible by those without an excellent working knowledge of the Balkan situation. But not to worry because we're still left with a rich storyline involving seduction, corruption, family squabbles, incarceration and one of Kusturica's specialities a set-piece wedding. Acting honors are divided equally and if the photography is only so-so what do you want, blood? Oh, you do. Well stick around. About five or six years.