In the Time of the Gypsies
Last weekend I finally got around to watching Emir Kusturica’s Time of the Gypsies. I really didn’t know what to expect. I heard it describes as a cinematic masterpiece and thought either another vilification or a sappy romanitization of the Rom. I wasn’t prepared for what Kusturica has done which is tell a story completely in the way of the Rom.
There are two essential qualities to understanding Romani life. First there is one’s bax (loosely translated as one’s fate and luck) and a question of balance. The question of balance is paramount, for without balance, one’s bax is completely corrupted and the ripples of one’s bax touches and echoes down through generations of the family. What puzzles me is how Kusturica, a Serb, gets this without being Rom, and can only wonder if he has sojourned among the Rom.
Kusturica employs a technique which he calls magical realism throughout the film and it works well to understand how the Rom perceive everything which surrounds their life and their place in the world. The Rom call the non-Rom ‘gagjov’ meaning literally; ones who are easily fooled. The Rom do not use the term to suggest a lack of mental cognizance but because the gagjov way of looking at the world is to look without seeing what lies just beneath the surface – hidden but always in plain sight. The irony is, even among the Rom, there resides an inner streak of gagjov, but then again, perhaps it is nothing more than a legacy of our shared humanity.
Part 1 can be found here with English subtitles.
