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L'amour et la mort in Belgrade, Eve and Suleiman the Magnificent and other connections. In a society in flux, the affair is enacted by outsiders: The modern girl from Hungary (Eva Ras), "quite a little homemaker," and the "clean, meticulous" Turkish rat-catcher (Slobodan Aligrudić). Dusan Makavejev sketches the first date snugly, like an early Milos Forman comedy, only to spike the shy coziness with jaunty inquiry, the couple's seduction intercut with Dziga Vertov footage of red flags flapping atop plundered cathedrals. Carnal afterglow with the heroine plus her soggy corpse fished out of a darkened pit, not in that order, flashforward shocks to cast an analytical pall over the romance. Eros and Thanatos have their lectures along the way, the elderly sexologist yearns for a lost pornocracy while the criminologist dispassionately displays his collection of skulls and nooses. "Interestingly enough, there's not one great artist, great poet or great writer who did not deal with the most ticklish sexual matters." Rhymes, songs, inserts, limericks. Makavejev's juggling is exceedingly rapid and fresh, from pleasure-seekers he moves to Mao and from pussycat on derrière to eggs and strudel set to Verdi. The great rodent threat devours everything ("even film stock"), the poisoned vermin gets its own verse, too. A fling with the postman while the beau is away precipitates the tragedy, she sprawled on a mortuary slab and he dazed in a weedy garden. Chicken coops and plumbing installations, Rembrandt's raunchy doodles and Tashlin's milk cartons, all of it goes into the collision of political ideology and human peculiarity. A ribald kaleidoscope, "a poem dedicated to you about wild flesh," a rueful investigation. The closing view stems from Ophüls' Liebelei. "Heart, renew itself. Onward, O time!" With Ružica Sokić, Miodrag Andrić, and Aleksandar Kostić. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |