Black Cat, White Cat

"Who's going to complain about a movie with too much stuff in it?" asked one critic rhetorically in his review of Serbian director Emir Kusturica's latest Balkan hellraiser. Um...that'd be me, actually. If nothing else, I wish the guy would turn the volume down a touch; I'm not anti-exuberance, by any means, but his films are so aggressively boisterous that I sometimes wind up feeling less entertained than assaulted. Kusturica's Underground compensated for its excesses with a strong political subtext and a killer high-concept plot; here, he tones down the former and jettisons the latter, leaving nothing to distract you from the grimy hands shaking your lapels. The parade of wacky grotesques is ceaseless: there are toothless, cackling Gypsies; bitter, marriage-hungry dwarf Gypsies; hidden, decomposing Gypsy corpses; Gypsies who fall into gallons of excrement and then clean themselves off with a live duck. The picture holds your attention--you certainly won't think "just what we need: yet another movie in which a woman pulls a nail out of a board with her behind for the delectation of a live audience"--but it never really goes much of anywhere, content instead merely to let its life-affirming (not to say life-throttling) characters indulge every hedonistic impulse imaginable. Optional. (M. D'Angelo)