– The object of Zare’s simple, pure love. She has eyes like gasoline rainbows and the patience of a saint — until she doesn’t.
That’s the film’s thesis: fortune and misfortune are inseparable lovers, tangled in a perpetual, drunken dance. Matko (Bajram Severdžan) – A half-hearted hustler who sells train fuel to Russians and ends up buried alive (don’t worry, he climbs out). His face is a map of failed schemes.
Set on the muddy banks of the Danube, somewhere between a Serbian village and a fever dream, the film follows two young lovers, Zare and Ida, who want nothing more than to be together. The problem? Zare’s father, Matko, is a small-time crook who owes money to the gangster Dadan. And Dadan’s solution is pure Kusturica: force Matko’s son to marry Dadan’s pint-sized, mobster sister.
What follows is a chase of pigs, a flying bed, a hidden toilet-tank fortune, and a wedding that doubles as a funeral — all scored by the thundering brass of Boban Marković’s orchestra. Let’s address the title. In Balkan superstition, a black cat crossing your path is bad luck. A white cat? Good luck. But Kusturica doesn’t choose. He gives you both — together — because life is never one or the other. The black cat and the white cat appear in a single, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot: two strays rubbing against each other under a table, oblivious to the chaos above.
Some films you watch. Others, you live inside for two and a half hours, breathing dust, rakija, and brass-band euphoria. Emir Kusturica’s Crna mačka, beli mačor (1998) is the latter — a whirlwind wedding of slapstick and poetry, filth and gold, death and dance.