Fri
24-Aug-2007

transylvania

Met up with Matt and two colleagues from his work, Eva and Nick. to see Transylvania, the latest Tony Gatlif film. Like Exils, Transylvania is visually breathtaking, drawing you into a bleak cold hard misty eastern European landscape. Gatlif can make a rubbish dump look beautiful and moving.

In Transylvania, an intense pregnant French girl, Zingarina, is looking for her Romany lover, who she thinks was deported from France but who actually left to escape from her. When he tells her this, she goes a bit mental and starts alternately latching on to people and abandoning them. She's interesting because on the one hand she is completely unable to look after herself, on the other, she's strikingly independent, wandering off into Transylvania in a trance by herself, relying on her ability to be adopted by people she meets. At one point she is teamed up with a little beggar girl, who looks after them both but exasperated at Zingarina's trance-like divorce from reality keeps shaking her and shouting: "wake up!"

It all ends quite well, with Zingarina getting together with an itinerant trader, who seems to feel both pleased and somewhat trapped by this fate...