Film for me is a matter of apprehension, of temporal experience of who you are relative to what is playing before you. So I don't care about a historicist or cinematic scholarly approach to films, in that film (and history) by itself is nothing, a carved artifact. This is my way of saying that there are probably several reasons to find this interesting, as token of 60s Yugoslav mores and 60s New Wave, admire the technique, which is wonderful in its freedom and placing. But for me, none of that matters when it doesn't enliven me.
A sexologist opens the film by humorously explaining the hidden omnipresence of sex in all we do, establishing the essence of the film as something to be secretly whispered and discovered.
The film follows a relationship between a rat exterminator and a blonde switchboard operator around Belgrade, the ups and downs. Salad days, captured with deliberate languidness. Eventually, there is betrayal and tragedy.
The point seems to be, contrasted levels of apprehension: everyday life in the affair in its dullness, small joy and unpredictability, with the system that frames that life as story, attempting to explain: 'experts' lecture on various topics, polemic footage of revolution play in ironic celebration, histories are recounted in voice-over. But you'll note, for instance, that the sexologist makes up nearly everything he says: Rembrandt did not paint sex, Mesopotamian priests did not sit ontop of a phallic column for days. The same fabrication then extends in the footage of joyous communist parades, a similarly subversive ploy is found in the silent Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks.
But it's a weird, incongruent alignment of cycles that fails and fails to build for an hour. One hour felt like two. A big reason seems to be that this sort of bare observation was fresh at the time, but overly familiar now so all the vitality has been zapped out.
It just wastes what could have been a tremendously powerful last scene, where so much of what we see could be toyed with as different levels of involved understanding: a murder has been set up early in the film, but we don't know it's going to feature in the story, the different levels are that suddenly we are aware of what's coming (the murder), unexpectedly what we find out (that it was an accident), and what were the human emotional dynamics (regret and despair, not hate). Imagine the richness..
