Time of the Gypsies: Kusturica's Levitating Folk Epic

The image everyone remembers from Time of the Gypsies (1988) is a bride floating. A white veil lifting off the ground on St George’s Day, a river below, Goran Bregović’s music underneath it, and the whole thing performed with the absolute straight face of a director who considers levitation a normal feature of the landscape. It is the sort of image that gets a film onto a hundred “most beautiful shots” lists and then, quietly, gets the film misfiled as a whimsy delivery system.

Emir Kusturica’s third feature is one of the least whimsical things I have ever sat through. Underneath the floating veils it is a picture about children being sold, and the levitation is there to make the selling land harder.

What it is

The original Serbo-Croatian title is Dom za vešanje — “House for Hanging” — which tells you rather more about the film’s intentions than the English one does. Perhan (Davor Dujmović) is a young Romani man living in a settlement outside Skopje with his grandmother Hatidža (Ljubica Adžović), a healer whose reputation reaches well beyond the community; his sister Danira, whose leg needs an operation nobody can pay for; and an uncle who gambles away everything that is not nailed to the floor.

Perhan can move objects with his mind. The film establishes this early, treats it as a fact of the world, and never once has a character marvel at it. He is also in love with Azra, whose mother regards him as worthless because he owns nothing.

Into this arrives Ahmed (Bora Todorović), a man with money, a car, and a proposal: he will take Danira to Ljubljana for her operation, and Perhan to Italy, where there is work. Perhan goes. What Ahmed’s business in Italy actually consists of is the engine of the film, and I will leave it below the line, though the film itself tells you fairly quickly and gives you a long time to sit with it.

Kusturica has said the picture began with a newspaper report about Romani children being trafficked out of Yugoslavia to beg in Italy. That is the spine. Everything airborne is hung on it.

Why it works: levitation as an argument

Here is the craft point that makes this film more than a folklore reel.

The magic belongs to the characters, and it is the first thing poverty takes. Perhan’s telekinesis is strongest in the settlement, surrounded by his grandmother’s healing and his own family’s noise. As the film moves him toward money — toward Ahmed’s car, Ahmed’s city, Ahmed’s business — the supernatural survives the journey. It gets used. That is the whole design. The gift stops being a wonder and starts being an asset with a market rate, and Kusturica shoots the transition without a single line of commentary. You simply notice, an hour in, that the miracles have started serving somebody’s balance sheet.

The camera never separates the real from the impossible. Cinematographer Vilko Filač keeps the film in a single register: hand-held, close, wading through mud and geese and children, and then simply tilting up when something starts to rise. There is no shift in lens, grade or music to flag “now we are in a dream”. A drunk uncle pulls a house down with a rope in the same visual grammar as a bride ascending over a river. Refuse to mark the boundary and the audience stops policing it — which means that when the film turns cruel, the cruelty arrives in the same unmarked register and you have no defence prepared.

The soundtrack is a character with an agenda. Bregović’s score, built on Balkan brass and Romani melody — “Ederlezi” above all — is euphoric almost throughout, including over scenes that are anything but. That mismatch is deliberate and it is the film’s sharpest tool. A brass band playing at full tilt over a boy’s humiliation makes the humiliation worse, because the world is refusing to lower its voice for him.

The performances came from non-professionals. Kusturica cast heavily from Romani communities and shot largely in Romani, which at the time made this one of the very few features to use the language at feature length. The looseness that produces — people talking over each other, scenes that spill past their dramatic function — is what keeps 142 minutes from calcifying into a fable. Fables have tidy edges. This has geese in shot.

Dujmović’s performance holds it together. He plays Perhan with an open, slightly stunned face that never asks the camera for sympathy, and he tracks the character’s hardening across two hours so gradually that you cannot name the scene where it happens.

The real ancestor

Everyone says Fellini, and everyone is half right. The carnival texture, the tolerance for grotesques, the willingness to let a scene run long past its plot value — that is Amarcord and La Strada, and Kusturica has never hidden the debt.

The truer ancestor is Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950). That film took the street children of Mexico City, refused to sentimentalise them, let one of them be genuinely cruel, and then dropped a dream sequence of raw meat and a floating mother into the middle of the realism without apology. Time of the Gypsies is the same manoeuvre, forty years on and with better weather: documentary-grade poverty, a protagonist who is not simply a victim, and surrealism used as a scalpel rather than a garnish. Once you have seen Los Olvidados, you cannot watch Kusturica’s Milan sequences as anything else.

For the levitation specifically, look to Tarkovsky. The floating bodies in Solaris and Mirror are the technical and spiritual source: bodies that rise at the exact moment something breaks loose in a life. Kusturica took that vocabulary out of the Russian art film and put it in a muddy settlement outside Skopje, and it survived the transplant.

The collector’s shelf around this one: Santa Sangre, for surrealism deployed as trauma rather than décor; Marketa Lazarová, for the same Eastern European instinct that mud and magic are the same substance; and City of God, which does the identical narrative arc — a boy from a poor community drawn into an economy that eats him — with a wholly different camera philosophy. Watching those two back to back is an education in how much the lens decides.

Kusturica’s own Underground came seven years later and is the same director at maximum volume; this is the quieter, better-behaved sibling, and I think it is the more durable film.

The case against

Two hours and twenty minutes is a long time to spend in a register this uncontrolled, and Kusturica’s tolerance for chaos does tip into indulgence. The middle of the Italian section sags. Characters wander off and come back. There is a stretch where the film seems to be enjoying its own energy more than it is advancing anybody’s fate.

The larger objection is one Romani critics have made since 1988 and it deserves airing rather than dismissal: the film trades in imagery — the turkey, the drunkenness, the thievery, the chaos — that maps uncomfortably onto centuries of stereotype, and the fact that it was made with Romani performers in the Romani language does not automatically settle the question of who the film is looking at and for whom. Kusturica’s defence has always been that he shot what he found. That is a defence, though it is not a complete one, and a viewer is entitled to hold both the beauty and the discomfort at once.

And the telekinesis, honestly, is a device that could have been cut. The film’s real magic is Bregović and the mud. The psychic business occasionally feels like a festival-friendly hook bolted to a story that did not need one.

The verdict

Time of the Gypsies won Kusturica the directing prize at Cannes in 1989 and it earned it. There is no other film that moves this fluently between a wedding, a con and an atrocity while keeping the same brass band playing. Its argument — that wonder and exploitation grow in the same soil, and that the people with the wonder are always the ones who get sold — is delivered entirely through image and sound, and it is delivered so lightly that a lot of viewers walk out remembering only the floating bride.

Go back for the bride. Stay for what the film does to her.

It circulates on the arthouse streaming services and has had decent restorations; the longer television cut exists and is worth finding once you love the film, though the theatrical version is the one that holds its shape.

Spoilers below

Ahmed’s business in Milan is child begging and theft, organised, with the children shipped in from home and worked in the street. Danira never reaches Ljubljana; the operation was a lie told to get Perhan into the car. He works out the shape of it slowly, and rather than escaping he climbs, becoming one of Ahmed’s lieutenants, running a crew of children himself. The film’s cruellest structural move is that Perhan’s telekinesis becomes a professional tool — the gift his grandmother nurtured now lifting other people’s wallets.

He goes home to marry Azra, who is pregnant, and refuses to believe the child is his. She dies in childbirth in a squalid, terrifying sequence, and Perhan takes the baby and returns to Italy to finish things.

The ending is a masterpiece of timing. At Ahmed’s wedding, Perhan kills him — using the telekinesis, driving a fork through him without touching it, which is the only time in the film the gift is used purely as a weapon — and is immediately shot by Ahmed’s bride. He dies with two coins on his eyes, the ritual payment for the ferryman, and in the final scene his own small son steals them off the corpse and runs, laughing, out of the frame.

That last shot is the whole film in three seconds. The theft is funny. The theft is inherited. The boy has already learnt the only trade on offer, and Kusturica lets him go without a word of judgement, because judgement would be cheaper than what he has just shown you.