Arizona Dream (1993)

Emir Kusturica's Arizona Dream arrives from 1993, a year when a European director could still drop Johnny Depp into the Arizona desert and let him dream about an Inuit fisherman hauling a halibut out of the ice. The plot, such as it is, involves a family Cadillac dealership, a trophy wedding, a woman building a flying machine, and a stepdaughter who wishes to be reincarnated as a turtle. The film drifts. It is meant to drift. Roger Ebert found it goofier than hell and could not look away, which remains the most accurate review on record.

The picture carries almost none of the social signifiers we are here to tally. Its romantic entanglements are entirely heterosexual. Its cast is uniformly white, European and American, with no representational ambition anywhere in the frame. Elaine and Grace are vivid, obsessive women, but the film cares about their obsessions, flight and reincarnation, not about any argument concerning women's place in the world. The Inuit dream sequences, conducted in Inuktitut, serve as magical-realist wallpaper. They evoke a culture without examining one. The Cadillac showroom and its American Dream keyword offer a faint whiff of consumerist critique, though the film is too enchanted with its own reverie to press the charge. There is no ecology here, no body politics, no neurodivergent affirmation, no historical revision, and no sermon. Kusturica never stops the movie to instruct us, which is its own small mercy.

What remains is a personal fable, lyrical and absurd, containing a shotgun, a piñata, a suicide, and a flying fish at the close. It is strange and sincere and entirely uninterested in the cultural ledger we keep. The eccentricity of these characters reads as surrealist whimsy, not as a condition to be affirmed or a thesis to be advanced. We are left with a dream about a fish, a Cadillac, and a man asleep on the roof of a dealership. The classification is straightforward. This is a pre-2015 humanist oddity, and it scores accordingly.