GADJO DILO (64)

Directed by: Tony Gatlif

Starring: Romain Duris, Rona Hartner, Izidor Serban

The Pitch: A young Frenchman struggles to understand (and be understood by) a village of Romanian Gypsies.

Theo Sez: How do you pin down a culture based on tall tales and deliberate exaggeration, where pretended emotion is part of the currency? The answer is you can't - and it's just as well. The key scene in this highly entertaining (if rather pointless) film is perhaps the one where an old Gypsy rants and raves furiously ("She's mine! You can't have her!") on his daughter's wedding day - then is suddenly mild as milk, wreathed in smiles and toasting the happy couple, when the bridegroom arrives with a crate of vodkas and lays them down before him as an offering, a price being paid : it was all pretend, merely acting out a part in the wedding ritual. It all makes for unreliable ethnography, which seems to be the point - and the reason why our hero finally destroys the tapes he's made of Gypsy music, realising it's a culture that's impossible to define (or reduce), just as Gatlif knows the ritualised machismo and quaint superstitions on display may be real or just theatre. Inevitably the result lacks substance, but makes up for it in atmosphere - you might say it's all foreplay, except that (as illustrated by the lovemaking scene towards the end) foreplay can be just as sensual as the act itself. Its one incontrovertible fact (unlike Kusturica's more celebratory Gypsy fictions) is the community's poverty and disenfranchisement - the contrast between their rigid traditions and the messiness of their real lives, and the eternal persecution they face (everyone laughs, as at stand-up comedy, when Serban claims that Gypsies in France - unlike Romania - suffer no discrimination). Beyond that it's mostly surface pleasures - dusky women in bright head-scarves, Balkan landscapes of mud and snow, little details like a double-bass comically caught on a clothesline, plus of course that great, soul-stirring music ; and it's mostly wonderful.