Emir Kusturica reveals his acting chops

The last time we saw the great Sarajevo-born director Emir Kusturica in Australia he was on stage at the Sydney Opera House with his No Smoking Band, a kind of rock'n'roll answer to the mad Balkan knees-ups featuring prominently in some of his films.

My chief memory of the event is not of his guitar playing as the fact that he wore shorts.

Now he's back - on screen, at least - but again not as a director. Kusturica takes one of the two lead roles in Christian Carion's French espionage film, Farewell, as a top KGB officer passing secrets to a French civilaian (played by Guillaume Canet). My review ran in The Australian at the weekend - see here.

So how does he fare on the other side of the camera?

Extract:
"On paper Kusturica appears an unlikely piece of casting. His only significant previous acting role I can recall was in Neil Jordan's The Good Thief, where he had a minor part that required him to do little more than strum an electric guitar and look mysterious.

"But forget preconceptions. The virtuoso director of such madcap films as Underground and Black Cat, White Cat gives a surprisingly rich and nuanced performance as a bear-like man whom we never quite know but instinctively want to trust.

"The accuracy or otherwise of Kusturica's accent I'll leave up to Russian linguistic experts. I will observe that while it's easy for foreign actors to make Russians seem like caricatures -- that accent seems to beg for it -- he never commits that sin."

Image: Ingeborga Dapkunaite and Kusturica in Farewell