Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

This is not only a great little movie, but also a great time-capsule of late-'60s Yugoslavia (a nation since destroyed by way of violent imperialist intervention).

A young Hungarian woman and an older, Serbian man enter into a relationship under the internationalist, multi-ethnic, mid-twentieth century culture of communist Yugoslavia. This work contains scenes of beautiful, deeply moving, intimacy and sexuality.

The contradictions of this culture are made plain within the movie by reference to scenes from a Russian revolutionary film by Dziga Vertoz: Committed communist masses dismantle an old Cathedral- their cause is clearly popular and democratic, yet it is intolerant of an institution that has itself embodied intolerance for millennia. "Revolutionary", "scientific" humanity remains constellated within a dialectic of resentment.

Ultimately, human frailty destroys both the Hungarian and the Serbian. Misunderstanding and jealousy cause the lovers to turn on, and destroy, each other within the the terms set forth by this "revolutionary" society. Progress creates the illusion of enlightenment. But ultimately it is human nature that decides our fate.

This outlook ultimately qualifies writer-director Dusan Makavejev as a philosophical reactionary, albeit an exceptionally creative one.

The combination of almost documentary approach with non-linear storytelling makes Love Affair arguably Makavejev's finest work.

The documentary approach, including a lot of archive footage, echoes Innocence Unprotected (Nevinost bez zaštite) as we follow common people during what turned out to be socialism's heyday in former Yugoslavia.

Non-linear storytelling has later been driven to the excess in WR: Mysteries of Organism (WR: Misterije organizma) rendering Love Affair much more accessible.

This must have been an extraordinary movie at the time, along with rather brave Eva Ras in one of the lead roles.

What I enjoyed most about this inexplicable Yugoslavian film was the source of pleasure in watching a movie filmed on grainy, imprecise celluloid stock. Every scene hums with that lovely old-fashioned atmosphere of maddeningly strenuous traditional film-making. We can sense the boom mikes, the film reel, the guys with big, uncomfortable headphones, and the director with a big vision that frustrates him by communication breakdown, as the outcome of his film is a bewilderingly ambiguous celluloid mishmash of sex, young lovers, totalitarian Yugoslavia, and nonlinear narrative structure.

And as such, it is a joy! It splurges and has fun! In one hour and nine minutes, its main thread, concerning a Hungarian switchboard operator who meets and falls in love with a Muslim who soon moves into her apartment much to the jealous chagrin of an imposing postal worker, intruding some touching intercuts of archive footage that give impressions of lives ensnared in totalitarian society, a brief history of how the gray rat infested Europe, and a sexologist in his study talking about the history of sex. Even the central train of thought is deconstructed into ambiguity as, seemingly at the same time, the police are investigating the drowning of a young woman.

Director Dusan Makavejev seems to have simply made a multi-faceted montage of Yugoslavia and reflections based on its time, 1967. In spite of its self-indulgence, as was a common limitation of progressive European art-house films of the time, it is very enjoyable.

"It's still unclear who will rule the Earth in 100 years: people or rats." - hmm, are the rats already ruling?

Wonderfully offbeat, this is like a Yugoslavian version of a French new wave film, directed by Dusan Makavejev and starring the fantastic Eva Ras. It shows how subversively naughty it's going to be from the beginning, with a sexologist talking about the ancients worshipping giant phalluses, with cuts to lewd classical images. The story is simple, but how it's told is anything but. It has a switchboard operator (Ras) taking a rat catcher (Slobodan Aligrudic) as a lover, an affair which ends in tragedy.

Throughout the story we get various lectures, including a criminologist talking about modern CSI advances, wonderment expressed over a hen's egg, and a description of notable rat infestations in history, which finishes with a poem to them scrolling up the screen. We also get a window into some of the humbler aspects of life in Yugoslavia at the time, including the woman's apartment where she makes coffee using an iron and the couple sit down to watch a "good" television show, which turns out to be a communist parade with marchers advocating the closing of churches, then looters destroying one. His garret makes her place look like a palace, but they're happy together - in one scene she makes a delectable looking strudel from scratch, stretching the dough out to a thin sheet, and in another, he gets a contractor in to install a water heater for her so she can take a hot shower.

As the story is told in an interleaved way, with a flash forward to her on a gurney in preparation for a postmortem, we know it's going to end badly, and the film gradually fills in how. Along the way we get lots of references to sex which seem like an assurance that it's natural and healthy, including most obviously Eva Ras showing off her beautiful body, and a return of the sexologist to describe a painting that could be thought of as pornographic by Dorde Andrejevic-Kun. Even the door to door wool thrasher is on the make, asking a middle-aged lady "Want me to thrash you too?" to which she replies, "Oh, I was thrashed long ago, my friend." It's therefore ironic that underneath all of its flair, the film could also be seen as a morality tale, as the Hungarian woman who can't go without sex for too long gets pregnant and then killed.

The film seems wonderfully realistic, shot in the streets of Belgrade with real people sometimes staring directly into the camera, and including footage down a wonderfully dank city well. At the same time, it's very playful, alternating between things like the woman blowing big soap bubbles into being on her hands before breaking the 4th wall, a 360 degree revolution shot around Adam and Eve being reenacted by a couple, and soaring communist era patriotic music.

The main thing I didn't like was that the postman who is incredibly aggressive and annoying with his sexual advances eventually gets his way, the old "no means yes if you persist long enough" crap. I considered lowering my review score a bit because of it, but the truth is that I was delighted at how creative this was, especially coming out of Yugoslavia in 1967. I will definitely be checking out more of Makavejev's work.

Dusan Makavejev is probably not a name that most people will recognize, but film buffs should. In the late '60s he was part of a wave of Yugoslav filmmakers who changed the face of that country's cinema (much like Mike Nichols in the US) in what got called the Black Wave. Since lots of people in the US only learned of Yugoslavia from the horrors of the 1990s war in Bosnia, it might surprise them that the country had a thriving film industry for a long time.

Anyway, Makavejev's "Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P. T. T." ("Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator" in English) tells of a romance between a switchboard operator and a sanitation inspector. I figure that the movie must've been hard to make, given some of the explicit scenes. But more important is the point that the movie makes about relationships, and it doesn't hold back.

Like "Carnal Knowledge" and "Portnoy's Complaint", this movie shows that relationships are bound to come with complications. I recommend it to everyone.