Kusturica is as much a brand in his way as the likes of Scorsese: you more or less know what contents to expect, and it's only the mix that varies from film to film. Hence, take lovably eccentric characters (be sure to always include roguish gangsters), blackly comic references to Serbian history and the West, a hectically jigging Balkan Gypsy soundtrack and add a hefty dose of magical realism. And shake, don't stir.
In Promise Me This, an ailing peasant sends his 14-year-old grandson off to the city to find himself a wife. There he becomes entangled with a band of bumbling mafiosi, smitten with a girl on a bike and taken in by a meatheaded double act of his steprelatives. Meanwhile, back on the farm, his grandfather devises increasingly complex Wallace and Gromity traps to frustrate a government inspector's amorous designs on the lusty local schoolmarm.
Unlike in the ribald tapestries of Kusturica's best work, such as Underground or Black Cat, White Cat, the mix here is too skewed towards wackiness for the mere sake of it (though mercifully short of the mark set in his execrable foray into the US in Arizona Dream) and rictus-grinning slapstick. The fantasy element of a human cannonball flying through scene after scene is just obtrusively mentally unhinged in a way reminiscent of the worst of Takashi Miike rather than transcendent. But Kusturica turbocharges the whole with so much gusto and vivacity that it's impossible to dislike and certainly never dull.
5/10
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