On the Milky Road (2016)

​This film is an experience that can not be measured, because it was made according to the recipe of the past. It was made the language of the seventies and eighties of the 20th century, the universal language, but a language that is rarely applied. Cinematography today opens up various windows, watching movies on your phone, iPad .... and less in the theater.

​So hello, that film you generally needed, in which Monica Bellucci wrestles a terrible CG wind on a minefield as detonating sheep pour down all around while adjacent, 2-time Palme d'Or-winning chief Emir Kusturica, playing a milkman with a broken leg, is spared when his closest companion, a peregrine hawk, pecks out the correct eye of the rebel ex-armed force commando attempting to kill him, is here. Kusturica's "On the Milky Road" is a debilitating, heartburn initiating maximalist tall tale that is part Aesop, part Looney Tunes, part Danielle Steele, and all Kusturica — be careful with the term mysterious authenticity: there is nothing of this present reality here. Urgently overfull of knickknacks and knickknacks and messed foundation activity, and everything except drained of topicality, significance or understanding, the film has been in progress for a long time now — one envisions Kusturica tinkering with it interminably in the carport like a Sunday specialist. Disclosing time must come, yet with "On the Milky Road," Kusturica tosses back the sheet and we're confronted not with the impeccably reestablished vintage Rolls Royce we may have sought after, however with a banging, wheezing Rube Goldberg jalopy, all steam shrieks and perfect timing dials, reverse discharges and pounding its riggings, burping smoke, commotion and pointlessness.

It does, in any case, have a totally breaking opening, when for only a couple of minutes, that loopy, folksy Kusturican goofiness completely works. In a modest group of homestead structures set in the beautiful Serbian wide open, sheep baa and dairy animals moo and a rush of woofing geese waddle by as two men drag a pig into a horse shelter for uproarious butcher, developing with cans of blood that they exhaust into a stranded bath. The geese, apparently mysteriously, hop into the shower and fold about, dousing themselves in gut, which all bodes well minutes after the fact when, in the midst of a great deal of other malarkey, we see a billow of flies slide, and the geese get the chance to nibble on them for elevenses. Treasure this snapshot of Old Macdonald clowning around, on the grounds that it's apparently the last time any of the contemplated wackiness of the human or creature conduct has a genuine explanation for it. ​

​As opposed to early introductions, we're not in some kind of rustic nineteenth century idyll — ambiguous helicopters thundering overhead and an adjacent civilian army station, at which fighters squabble and chatter, especially unconcerned by the blasts and gunfire pouring down all around, recommend that the film is really set in the '90s at some point amid the Yugoslav Wars, in light of the fact that it's set any genuine time by any stretch of the imagination. More than a conspicuous chronicled period we're in a dream Kusturicaville, that exists in such a perpetual condition of war that it has turned into the standard, and disobediently crackpot provincial life has developed in around it like weeds recovering a surrendered vehicle.

​On the Milky Road is inspired by Kusturica’s short film Our Life, and consists of three stories: the first story is about a soldier with a task to get milk in the nearby village and take it to fellow soldiers. The second is about a woman who gives him the milk, and the third is about an ex-soldier (now a monk) who, when he finishes all daily duties, climbs up the cliff with a bucket of rocks to empty it.

The movie unfolds as a three part narrative following three challenging periods of this man’s life, both for him and his native land: on the difficult period while at war, on a blossoming time when he falls in love for a woman who is willing to sacrifice all to save him, and during his last days as a reclusive monk which looks back to his turbulent life.

​"On the milky road" is a great humanist and pacifist story with all the emotions that show the deep absurdity of the war in the former Yugoslavia. All wars in general.