Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

Early on in his wildly experimental career, Dusan Makavejev was proving himself to be one of world cinema's most unique talents. With his brilliant, genre bending masterpiece "Love Affair", he crafts a simplistic, beautiful, and devastating portrait of one of film history's most tragic romances. Of course, Makavejev's vision is not limited by the boundaries of conventional storytelling and tone. Spliced in between the romantic tragicomedy are interviews with a sexologist and a criminologist, as well as various bits of stock footage depicting Yugoslavian politics.

This often weird and humorous version of a brutally sad tale is among my new favorite films thanks to its entertainment value, stunningly unique vision, wild sense of humor, and strong emotional impact. Makavejev pulls no punches, he allows the tragedy to burst in a chaotic explosion of tears, refusing to hold back. By the end, i was so struck with melancholy that I could hardly believe what I had just witnessed. This is a film that combines so many themes and genres, and yet manages to portray a semi-tradition story that anyone can follow. Sprinkling bits and pieces of the charmingly surreal and avant garde all over this saddening love story, Makavejev forms one of the finest, most unfortunately underrated and obscure cinematic romances of all time.

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.

(1967) Love Affair; Or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator/ Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice (In Yugoslavia with English subtitles) DRAMA

Co-written and directed by Dusan Makavejev with an examination between Izabela, (Eva Rass) the telephone operator living in a crummy apartment and meeting with Ahmed (Slobodan Aligrudic) a sanitation inspektor fall in love with one another leading to one thing after another. The title of the movie says it all that does a good job of examining the relationship without succeeding to point out it's turning point. I'd love to hear what the culprit had to say as it ends on that unsatisfying note.

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.