June 10, 2001

TIME OF THE GYPSIES (DOM ZA VESANJE) Yugoslavia, 1989. Color. Subtitles. Rated R. 142 Minutes. Directed by Emir Kusturica. Starring Davor Dujmovic, Bora Todorovic, Ljubica Adzovic.

Emir Kusturica's third film is an epic look at Gypsy life and culture through the eyes of a kindhearted teenager named Perhan (Davor Dujmovic). Forced to take his younger sister, Danira (Elvira Salvi), to a hospital, where she is to have an operation on her bad leg, Perhan somehow becomes separated from her. He spends the rest of the movie desperately searching for Danira, so they can complete their journey and he can return home to marry Azra (Sinolicka Trpkova). "The Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica is a specialist in grungy lyricism," writes Hal Hinson of The Washington Post. "… [T]he images of his bumbling, histrionic characters, living their shabby lives, move with the suspended, weightless rhythms of hallucinations. As a stylist, he makes everything seem to float, held aloft by a combination of folksy superstition and mysticism, like reveries hammered together out of junkyard pieces. The transcendent and the vulgar, the prosaic and poetic, are in perfect balance. Even his epiphanies are mud-splattered."