Transylvania

Star Review

The latest film from Franco-Algerian filmmaker Tony Gatlif returns to Romania, the setting of his best-known film, Gadjo Dilo.
Here, though, the protagonist is Italian-born Zingarina (Asia Argento) who has followed her lover to his native country while pregnant with his child. Though her romantic dreams are abruptly and callously shattered, she nonetheless decides to stay and eke out a nomadic existence, in consort with itinerant tinker Tchangalo (the fabulously hangdog Birol Ünel), with whom she forms an uneasy alliance. As ever with Gatlif's films, though, the narrative takes a back seat to the rich blend of widescreen photography, colour, costume, location and above all music, with onscreen numbers ranging from wild gypsy fiddling to a haunting a cappella piece that accompanies a ritual purification ceremony.

Emir Kusturica fans will find much that they recognise, but Gatlif's films offer subtler pleasures too: as 2004's Exiles also proved, he's currently one of the cinema's most acute chroniclers of that peculiar emotional state which arises from an undefined sense of cultural displacement.

Michael Brooke on 4th February 2008

View all 56 of Michael Brooke’s reviews

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Film Description

Asia Argento plays Zingarina, a woman who arrives in Transylvania to look for her long-lost lover. Distraught after his rejection, she cuts herself loose from everything she holds dear and plunges herself into the revelry and thrumming festivities of a Romany carnival. Lured ever deeper into the hills of Romania, she then meets a travelling trader who takes her on a road trip during which they indulge in wild bouts of gypsy dancing and nights of passion.

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DVD Extras

• 2 bonus songs from the soundtrack
• Making of
• Q&A with director and star.

Film Details

Cast

Amira Casar, Asia Argento, Birol Unel

Technical Details