Zivot je cudo (2004)

English title: Life Is a Miracle.

[Complete plot, with serious spoilers]

Prior to the Bosnian war, in a small town, a man works as an engineer for the local railway and has a dissatisfied wife who used to sing opera and is emotionally unstable. They have a son who plays football (that's soccer for you Yanks) and aspires to become a professional player. He is drafted for Army service and then the war begins. His mother runs away with a Hungarian musician. A local soldier kidnaps a Serbian woman who worked at the local hospital expecting to trade her for the engineer's son who has been taken prisoner. She is placed in the engineer's house as a hostage but she had long had a crush on him so she willingly obliges. A romance blossoms between the two until one day his wife returns. Also, the war has ended and the Serbian woman is in the U.N.'s prisoners list and must be returned to her country. They try to escape from Bosnia but she is shot in the leg. She goes to a hospital and from there they take her to Serbia; the engineer runs after her but on the bridge he finds his son returning to Bosnia, which causes him to lose her. He loses track of her and returns to his old life; he gets so despondent that he tries to kill himself by placing his head on the train rail. A donkey, who was -- as he had been time and again throughout the film -- stopped on the track in an attempt, according to his owner (who is himself a ghost according to another character), to kill himself over a love pain, prevented him from getting killed. He is taken with exhilaration and, in a "dream" or premonitory sequence, is seen riding the donkey with his beloved. Minor supblots: a mayor who will not comply with a corruption scheme is assassinated at his lawyer's orders; this lawyer subsequently takes his place and is referred to in one mysterious subtitle as "bisexual".

Very noisy and festively vulgar. Every character seems to have one screw loose. Not particularly remarkable but done with feeling, it seems. The problem with this kind of feeling, as expressed in the title, is that it doesn't have the universal appeal to which it aspires. It ultimately proves only that "life in this particular movie is a miracle".

Rating: 53