WHEN FATHER WAS AWAY ON BUSINESS Movie Review

The title of Emir Kusturica's 1985 film, set in the Sarajevo of the 1950s, refers to the “cover-up” that was invoked in trying to explain a father's whereabouts to the movie's six-year-old protagonist. Dad is in a political prison (he's a bit too vocal with his opinions on Tito), and little Malik is given an early start on the euphemisms and rationalizations that allowed an entire society to delude itself for generations. Kusturica's portrait of survival and human adaptability under such a system is touching, funny, and frightening. Following its Grand Prize at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, the film became moderately successful in the U.S. (it was shortened by about ten minutes after Cannes for American release), receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. (Still, who could have imagined that just eight years later Kusturica would make Arizona Dream, in which Johnny Depp co-starred with Jerry Lewis, who played both a car salesman and an Eskimo? Now that's what I call the new world order.) When Father Was Away on Business is a good and brave film, but Kusturica would take its themes all the way in his brilliant and visionary Underground a decade later.

NEXT STOP … Tito and Me, Man Is Not a Bird, Underground

1985 (R) 144m/C YU Moreno D'E Bartolli, Miki Manojlovic, Mirjana Karanovic; D: Emir Kusturica. Cannes Film Festival ‘85: Best Film; Nominations: Academy Awards ‘85: Best Foreign-Language Film. VHS FXL