

Other noteworthy features are Gatlif's distinctive visual style, which combines documentary realism with dreamlike images that add emotional punch to key scenes, and the deeply affecting performances of both Duris and Hartner, who plays Stéphane's volcanic gypsy lover.
#Gadjo dilo film full
Gadjo Dilo is a full immersion into a wild, flamboyant, and electrifyingly sexy culture that should revitalize the libidos of most American viewers – at least those who aren't put off by all the emotional overkill which, admittedly, verges often on Monty Python territory. Within weeks, he's perfectly integrated into a social milieu in which ordinary conversations include shouts of “eat the hairs of my cock!” and where plate-smashing and dry-humping are traditional dance-floor moves. As it turns out, Stéphane's questing heart has room enough for the ritualized craziness of gypsy life. Instead, what Gatlif is asking us to consider (or, rather, feel) is Stéphane's reaction to the exotic, marginalized society he's been thrust into. Plot happens, in a fitful, harum-scarum way, but it really doesn't seem to be the point.

There, he's warily regarded as a “gadjo dilo” (crazy outsider) who needs to be watched like a hawk lest he skip town with a sackful of stolen chickens. Somewhere in Romania, the winter cold forces Stéphane to take shelter in a ramshackle gypsy village. The main storyline concerns a scruffy-handsome young Frenchman named Stéphane (Duris) who's trekking the Balkans in search of a singer he only knows as a haunting voice on an old homemade cassette. Like his two previous American releases, Latcho Drom (1993) and Mondo (1996), Gadjo Dilo illuminates the little-understood culture of European gypsies. But Gatlif, a son of Spanish gypsies, is one of those rare, instinctive artists who seems wholly motivated by the desire to envelope viewers in his sense of intoxication with the world's beauty and mystery. It's an easy point to forget, what with all these social anthropologists and French literary critics around trying to put a utilitarian or theoretical spin on a primordial human impulse. Tony Gatlif makes movies for people who recognize that the essence of storytelling is enchantment.
