GADJO DILO SERIES

Monika Juhasz Miczura provides the voice of Nora Luca (unseen in the film).She wakes up, notices the impromptu 'funeral' that Stephane is holding and smiles before the screen fades to black. A shot of the back of the car reveals Sabina sleeping in the back seat. He then drinks from a vodka bottle, spills some on the 'grave' of the tapes, lays the bottle of the 'grave' and then dances as Izidor did at his friends funeral. Grief-stricken, he smashes all the tapes he recorded during his travels with Sabina on the stone marker and buries them. Stephane leaves the village drives to the mile marker where the film opened. They hurry to the concert venue and tell Izidor, who races outside and begs the earth to open and reunite him with his son. Sabina and Stephane return to find the smoldering ruins and are both devastated. Adriani escapes, but a mob follows him and burns the village to the ground, killing Adriani. While they are away, Adriani goes to the local bar, where he murders a man that he accuses of being responsible for his imprisonment. The village rejoices, but the men soon have to leave to work at a performance and the two lovebirds sneak off to be together. One day, just as the pair are beginning to make love for the first time, Adriani returns after many months in jail.

GADJO DILO SERIES

The only person in the village who speaks any French is the tough Sabina, a divorced Romani dancer who is blatantly hostile towards him at first, but the pair eventually bond through a series of trips across the countryside to record traditional Romani music. Stephane gradually wins them over by showing his respect for their music and culture and is rewarded with an intimate look into every aspect of Roma life, from a raucous wedding to a bittersweet funeral.

The other Roma dislike Stephane at first, insulting him in their language and believing him to be a lunatic, tricking him into saying rude words and even into entering a tent where women are bathing. Izidor is happy to have him as a guest, calling him 'his Frenchman' and fixing the young wanderers worn-out shoes. Stephane believes that Izidor will take him to Nora Luca when the time has come, so he lives in the Roma village for several months in Izidors house, as Izidors son Adriani has been arrested. Drunken Izidor only hears the handful of Romani words and takes Stephane to his village, determined to teach the boy the Romani language. Wandering along a frozen road, he meets old Izidor, a Rom (Gypsy) and tries tell him of Nora Luca.

He is looking for the singer Nora Luca, whom his father had heard all the time before his death. It's a rewarding experience to go along with this crazy film and become, just for a little while, part of another community, part of another way of life.Stephane, a young French man from Paris, travels to Romania. Playing against such reality could be a challenge but Romain Duris just sort of fits into this colourful world so easily, as does Rona Hartner. But it's rich in details too - Izidor's gypsy tribe are wary of this stranger, they worry that he's going to steal their women or their chickens. Izidor is the core of the film, it's really his story we're witnessing, and he's a wonderful film character. The film is rich in language - gypsy love talk is pretty direct, their casual insults are colourful in a sexually explicit way - and it's rich in humanness. And while Tony Gatlif celebrates gypsy life and music he exposes their plight as outsiders in Romania with subtlety and compassion. Gadjo Dilo is a very seductive film, because you feel what you are seeing has a truth to it that goes beyond normal fictional filmmaking. Stephane finds himself being seduced by the gypsy zest for life, especially when he meets Sabine - Rona Hartner. He makes it impossible for Stephane to leave. Izidor's son has just been sent to gaol for six months so it's natural for Izidor to want to adopt Stephane whom he takes home almost like a prize possession. He meets up with a drunken gypsy Izidor - Izidor Serban - a man of extreme emotions with an unbounded capacity for joy, for anguish and for vodka. It's midwinter in Romania and Stephane - Romain Duris - is wandering through remote regions of the country trying to find a singer which his father had recorded on tape. With Gadjo Dilo, he once again enters the world of gypsies. When you're a filmmaker like Tony Gatlif who made Latcho Drom you're already halfway there because he takes a reality and inserts a fiction. Movies attempt to create reality for us, the audience, out of fantasy.

Gadjo dilo