Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

That European cinema did things differently in the 1960s is not in doubt, as even directors from little-renowned cinematic cultures such as Yugoslavia delighted in new-found freedom. On one hand, "Switchboard Operator" is a simple tale of love, betrayal and tragedy in Belgrade, and as such captures some touching details about trapped lives in a totalitarian society. However, director Dusan Makavejev, clearly under the influence of Godard, adopts an offhand approach to his narrative, and introduces extraneous material at tangents to the main story. Most of this stuff is fascinating, particularly when he uses archive footage of Yugoslav history. Less successful are the interjections of two tedious academics, a sexologist and a criminologist, whose stern pronouncements jar against the film's capricious tone. Nonetheless, this is invigorating film-making which reaches into some strange regions. Despite an economical running time of 69 minutes, the film even finds time for a brief history of how the grey rat infested Europe!

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.

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.

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.

"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.