Emir Kusturica 1981 Yugoslavia
Starring: Slavko Štimac, Ljiljana Blagojević, Slobodan Aligrudić, Mira Banjac, Pavle Vuisić
In the modern day the director Emir Kusturica is a big name in world cinema and is perhaps best known for his 2004 tour de force Life Is A Miracle, a film often completely at odds with the upbeat connotations of its title. The earliest of his bone-dry, ink-black farces Do You Remember Dolly Bell? is another case of opposites, featuring deadpan comedy and occasional slapstick alongside poignant drama, this time taking as its subject communism, childhood and coming-of age in 1960's Sarajevo. Perhaps predictably however these kids aren't your archetypal lovable movie brats, their main hobbies being smoking, necking wine from the bottle and delinquency. One even wears a bandage around his head throughout after being deafened in the process of his crimes although he seems relatively untroubled by his new state, even joking "I can almost hear the blood ringing in my ears" after he loses his virginity. The response of the increasingly impotent authority figures is to start a dance band (alongside voluntary labour of course) but the children's hearts aren't really in it. Overall the only one of the youths who seems as if he might have a future is Slavko Štimac's Dino who is not only smart, good at chess and able to hold up his end in an argument about Karl Marx, he's also obsessed with hypnotism although nothing transfixes him quite like the sight of Dolly Bell, the teenage prostitute he hides in his pigeon shed, putting on her stockings. Dolly is the complete opposite and acts as both a counterpoint and a example of the potential for victimisation of the area's children. Intellectually she's a blank slate, unable to read or write, and when Dino starts talking about communism she thinks its a country. Gradually the two form a sort of relationship with him teaching her what he can and her guiding him into puberty. In one funny moment she shows him the theory of kissing but he approaches it by moving his face exactly to her instructions and is interrupted mid-embrace by a pigeon shitting on his forehead. If this sounds puerile it's because it would be in the hands of a lesser director but Kusturica approaches the silliest and darkest of his scenes with a pokerfaced delicacy that renders them closer to Keatonesque silent comedy than teen movie crudity. Yet this is no clichéd saviour story, in fact at times it seems that all Dino has is his recurrent mantra, "Everyday in every way I'm getting better and better", one that to Western audiences places him somewhere between Émile Coué and Frank Spencer, although the latter comparison is almost certainly unintentional. What's more certain however is that, like many of Kusturica's other works, DYRDB (if you'll forgive the abbreviation) is never less than likeable and, at its best, superb and almost wholly atypical, the only possible cinematic likeness being Finland's Aki Kaurismäki, although Kusturica is decidedly less miserable and arguably a little more accomplished.
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