![]() And Gatlif directs with a beautifully restrained hand. The two-way cultural exchange makes for sublime moments as Stephane teaches the old man to say unprintable things about Jean-Marie Le Pen and the village children teach Stephane to say unprintable things about. Gatlif's film is a dazzling blend of ethnographic documentary and artfully constructed narrative which mixes raucous comedy with social commentary into a fizzy cinematic cocktail, spiked with the music and dance which so intoxicated us in Latcho Drom. The lustrous Sabina (Hartner), a refugee from a bad marriage to a Belgian, helps him over the language barrier Izidor's patronage helps him across the cultural divide and before the film has run its course he has entered into the world of his hosts in a way he would never have imagined. But the bibulous fiddler Izidor (Serban) adopts him as a son and shields him from the villagers' hostility. When Stephen (Duris) arrives at a snowbound village in Romania searching for a legendary gypsy folk-singer who recorded one of his father's songs, the soles are out of his shoes and he is distrusted and taunted by the villagers as a "gadjo dilo" or "crazy stranger". This Gadjo Dilo and that Gadjo Dilo.Reviewed by Peter Calder Cast: Romain Duris, Rona Hartner, Izidor Serban Director: Tony Gatlif In the third part of an informal trilogy which began with Les Princes in 1982 and continued with the enchanting Latcho Drom of two years ago Gatlif approaches his theme - the marginalisation of European gypsies - indirectly the common gypsy experience of being an outsider is visited on a hip Parisian rather than the rough-hewn Romany. So that’s the Gadjo Dilo story of the Roma. He can bury his love of Nora Luca as he needs must his father and live with real suffering in the present. He learns something of the way of the Roma by learning of their suffering. In a brutal ending to the film the young man buries his search for Nora Luca as his adoptive father had buried and mourned over the open grave of his friend. But the voice comes from the young heroine of the film and she is not Nora Luca. There he lives, there he learns and there he eventually records music until one day he hears, finally, through tears, Nora Luca singing for him. The drunk and mourning father adopts him on the local town square and takes him back home. He is taken into a Roma village by a man whose son has just been sent to prison. He finds wonderful musicians, fiddle players, a precociously talented young accordionist and singer. He finds everything except a living Nora. This voice obviously haunted our young Gadjo Dilo and after his father’s death he set off into rural Romania in search of Nora. His favourite tape, his favourite voice, his favourite recording was Nora Luca. We hear that he died somewhere in the Middle East with the Bedouin. ![]() His father was a traveller the film tells us, his father wandered far and wide spending his time with remote people, recording them playing music and singing. This particular Gadjo Dilo in the film is looking for a singer, a gypsy singer, a Romanian gypsy singer called Nora Luca. I’ve got big teeth too and I was once a young man. “Look at his big teeth!” says one of the Roma children in the film. The Gadjo in this film is a French person. I am a Gadjo and I recognise the representation of the Gadjo dream. I’m not Roma so I don’t know how the representation of Roma feels. I’m not at all sure how to speak about this film. So I managed to follow links through and find the complete film with English subtitles and I’ve posted the links below. This clearly appealed to me too, the word I’d use is pathos. The older man drank from a bottle of vodka and poured libations on the grave through his tears. This one showed the young man who had been conducting the recording standing next to a fresh grave where an older Roma man wept and danced next to the grave of his friend whilst a young man sang and played the accordion. The clip was obviously sufficiently appealing to me that I followed a link through to a second clip. The title means “Crazy Gadjo” or “Nutty Outsider” or some version of saying mad non-Roma person! It was a couple of minutes of footage of some Romanian Roma musicians playing and singing in a cafe, a young woman dancing whilst a young man recorded an audio tape of the music. A friend of mine, Miroslav, just the other day posted a link to a short scene from a film titled “Gadjo Dilo”.
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