Do You Remember Dolly Bell?

Kusturica's first feature-length film when he was 27, a teenage story in Sarajevo. The growth of a young boy who faces the first experience of sex with Dolly Bell, his odd family members and his band.

The film is typical of Kusturica, full of noisy but cozy music, funny and distinctive characters. And sometimes the bittersweet feeling haunts me quite a long time during the film. I haven't seen a lot of Emir's works, besides this one I have only seen "Black Cat, White Cat", love the satirical comedy style, great way to magnify the neglectable truth of the society.

Hypnosis and Communism, quite different stuff but all some kind of Utopian, I live in a socialistic country and watch a film from Yugoslavia which used to be a socialistic one, but failed. So many similarities can find between peoples, lively and spiritual-satisfied with the situations. We cannot realize Communism by hypnosis, in a real world, that's cruel but true.

Loneliness is always the most severe sickness among people, even this film has so many characters, but still you can smell the loneliness throughout it, it's nothing to do with Communism or Capitolism, the hopelessness is always buried inside deeply in our hearts.

Do you remember Dolly Bell? after watching this movie, I cannot remember her look, just a vague silhouette, because everyone has his or her own image of Dolly Bell, we can say goodbye to our youth thoroughly, thank every Dolly Bell and smile.

Emir Kusturica's first film Do You Remember Dolly Bell? is a bittersweet comedy set in the former Yugoslavia during the 1960s. The film, which won the Golden Lion Prize at the 1981 Venice Film Festival, is both a coming of age story and a tribute to the city of Sarajevo, long before it was devastated by civil war. To the chagrin of his strict Communist father (Slobodan Aligrudic), sixteen-year old Dino (Slavo Stimac) is more into hypnosis and self-help mantras than Marxist ideology. He recites the phrase "Every day in every way I'm getting better and better" and sings in a new band mandated by the local Eastern European bureaucracy as they relax the Communist grip and allow some influence of Western culture.

Dino's family of six live in a cramped one-room house while they wait for state housing. The father drinks excessively and the family is poor. This is underscored when, during a visit to relatives, the youngest boy makes a point of saying how much he wishes he had a bicycle like the one he sees in the relative's home. Through Dino's relationship with Sonny, an unsavory pimp, he meets a cabaret singer and prostitute Dolly Bell (Ljiljana Blagojevic), named after a stripper in an Italian film they had seen recently at the Culture Club. Dolly is forced by Sonny to wait in the attic of Dino's home until he returns and Dino is a passive onlooker as a band of delinquent boys take their turn with her.

Dino's sweet innocence captivates the young girl, however, and the two form a bond that results in Dino's sexual initiation and first love affair. Dino has to cope with his father's illness, a lung cancer that has become life-threatening and their days together reveal a much mellower man who tells Dino he knew about the girl in the loft and no longer disapproves his using hypnosis and auto-suggestion. While Dolly Bell lacks the polish and cinematic flair of Kusturica's later work, it is an honest and intelligent film, one that avoids sentimentality and provides compelling insight into what it meant to grow up in Eastern Europe during the sixties.

Kusturica is something of a challenge for me to parse. The experience is a bit troubling because it seems so genuine that we should be ashamed for intruding. He does not seem to accomplish this by ordinary means. Yes, the acting is good, but what works here is something quite a bit deeper than usual.

Instead of the world of the film coming to us, as is usually the case, he inserts the camera in such a way that we – or rather our intent to see – brings it into being. This is an early film, and already he seems to have mastered the art of composition. This has a couple of his trademarked panning sequences that are the most elaborately choreographed I know. But more than that, each scene progresses through what seems to be an ordered diorama of gypsy projection. It is intensely human. I can imagine the filmmaker crying as he blocks the shot and places the actors, lights, camera.

I can imagine him obsessing over how objects and shadows form families that work the way the central family does here. I can see his passion in how he guides the camera in arcs that are unnatural. It is a wonder he continued to make films, such is the obvious cost.

A lost nation. A lost larger family. A lost love. Do we remember? Can you?

Because I encounter young filmmakers, and see their first works, I know it is possible to spring whole into the art, allowing open completion of soul to make up for insufficient craft. As time went on, Emir learned to layer humor and circumstance, to tell a story. But nothing he will do can match this, his first love.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Post written by a person nicknamed No Gods, perhaps just proves that this movie may not be for consumption by audiences outside of the Balkans. He/she completely missed the point. There's so much more to this movie, watching it was of great joy and delight for me.

It gives an honest, simple and raw account of Sarajevo realities back in the 1960s, when it was an expanding city in Tito's Yugoslavia. 'Dolly Bell' offers many memorable snapshots that it uses as setting: teenagers mimicking Adriano Celentano, audiences watching 'Rome by night', couples with children dreaming of moving into new housing complexes built by the communist government, lunches with extended family members, community center struggling to buy instruments for their band.....etc, etc. And all this while the main character Dino (played by Kusturica's favourite Slavko Stimac) is finding his way through adolescence.

Basically, the movie is Kusturica's and Sidran's love letter to their respective childhoods, which happened to take place during an interesting time in Yugoslav history not too long after World War II when the country was being rebuilt under new social order and a tangible sense of excitement of participating in something good and worthy was felt amongst certain sections of its population.

Kusturica would of course go on to make much more serious and challenging films later in his career, but this one shows his ability to successfully deal with simple stories that are not driven by big, complex ideas and don't have an instantly dramatic setting.

Excellent. One word to describe the hour and a half of a master-piece.I'm not so sure that non-ex-yugoslav audience would use word master-piece but I think we would all agree that we are talking about excellent , marvelous , memorable (and etc) movie.Well , to be honest , I never expected less from Emir Kusturica as a director teamed with Abdulah Sidran (who is a poet) as a screenplay writer , who gave the movie intelligent and funny dialogues (really a lot of quotes to remember) combined with deep and memorable talking about communism brought to the audience trough the words of main character Dino's father (whose occupation is head waiter in the restaurant). But , before everything `Do you remember , Dolly Bell' is a movie who drags you to the past , to the ‘60s in the Sarajevo , Yugoslavia , making you wish that you were there then , just to feel the life of the previous generations in the communist system in the time of yugoslav `brotherhood and unity'. Except that it is also the movie about life in the tough neighbourhood full of scoundrels of any kind. After all, Dolly Bell is a victim of the one of them , and Dino tryes to rescue her in the name of love what gives the movie romantic note.One more good thing in the movie is guaranteed – the music.It's simply marvelously selected so it really gives the right image of the ‘60s in Sarajevo (of course you ought to know that in the ‘70s Sarajevo became capital of ex-yugoslav rock ‘n' roll , so in some way movie represents roots of rock ‘n' roll in Yugoslavia). So , what more to say than – watch the movie and you'll remember Dolly Bell for the rest of your life.