DO YOU REMEMBER DOLLY BELL? (47)

Directed by: Emir Kusturica (1981)

Starring: Slavko Stimac, Slobodan Aligrudic

The Pitch: Growing up in 1960s Sarajevo.

Theo Sez: Intermittently charming film - winner of the Golden Lion at the 1981 Venice Film Festival - that goes nowhere very much but shows occasional glimmers of Kusturica's emerging style: the way he'll have parallel action going on in the back of a frame, or perhaps the underscoring of a scene with someone playing a harmonica or the sound of a muezzin. Otherwise it's pretty much the standard European coming-of-age movie, struck from the basic AMARCORD template - a blustery father, an assortment of mildly eccentric relatives, sexual cravings and final initiation (followed by a held-long, luxuriously smug I-am-now-a-man shot). It adds the semi-satiric drabness common to pre-90s (i.e. Communist-era) Eastern European films - a world of shabby youth clubs and lip-service Marxist jargon - plus an unexpected tenderness for its naive young hero, a likeably befuddled 15-year-old vaguely reminiscent of Noah Taylor in THE YEAR MY VOICE BROKE (constantly trying to master the fine points of hypnosis or repeating, mantra-like, that "every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better"). Nonetheless it's more a calling-card than a real movie, undeniably accomplished but a little lacking in character: a young director finding his feet, bringing some original detail but little in the way of new ideas, and almost nothing in the way of momentum.