‘Time of the Gypsies’ (R)

The Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica is a specialist in grungy lyricism. In his latest effort, "Time of the Gypsies," the images of his bumbling, histrionic characters, living their shabby lives, move with the suspended, weightless rhythms of hallucinations. As a stylist, he makes everything seem to float, held aloft by a combination of folksy superstition and mysticism, like reveries hammered together out of junkyard pieces. The transcendent and the vulgar, the prosaic and poetic, are in perfect balance. Even his epiphanies are mud-splattered.

The film, about 90 percent of which was shot in the Gypsy dialect of Romany, is set in the village of Sutka, and its characters are the lowliest imaginable. Perhan (Davor Dujmovic), the movie's central figure, is a stringy young lad with black horn-rims and a gawky slouch who lives with his grandmother (Ljubica Adzovic), the village healer. Unlike his Uncle Merdzan (Husnija Hasimovic), a good-for-nothing, gambling lecher who also lives with them, Perhan is a good boy, honest, loving, his grandma's favorite. But when his sister Danira (Elvira Sali) is taken ill with a leg ailment and has to be operated on, the boy is drawn under the influence of the prosperous Gypsy leader Ahmed, who takes him to Italy and into a low-life community of whores and thieves.

Made with real Gypsies who in addition to never having acted before were also illiterate, the picture tells the story of Perhan's transition from an innocent, accordion-playing boy whose only passions are for his grandmother, his girlfriend, Azra (Sinolicka Trpkova), and his pet turkey, into a small-time master crook. In revealing his corruption, Kusturica immerses us deeply in the milieu of the Gypsy. The appeal of this is basic. "Time of the Gypsies" shows us a wholly unfamiliar place where magic and special powers still hold sway over science and reason; where, when a man gets drunk, he's liable to tie a rope to his house, hitch it up to a tractor, and pull it off its foundation; where if a boy dreams of a glorious white bird, that bird is a turkey.

This is a movie full of hauntingly beautiful moments. In one scene, a wedding veil drifts serenely over the traffic on a superhighway; in another, a goose soars awkwardly over a campfire. But there are raucous, noisy moments too, when the characters squabble violently and then, in an instant, forget their differences and continue on as if nothing had happened. For the first part of the film, Kusturica's parade of ethnic eccentricity is transfixing; you follow along out of sheer curiosity, if nothing else. But the director's storytelling style is scattered and unsatisfying, and the characters have a folkloric one-dimensionality that taxes instead of enhances our interest.

Ultimately, when Perhan returns to his village to find that his girlfriend is pregnant -- perhaps by his uncle -- and he decides to sell the child instead of keeping it, the picture loses its edge and collapses into a funk. Kusturica and his partner, screenwriter Gordan Milac, have a talent for odd bits of business, but their movie drifts away from them. Plus, I came away not knowing whether they saw their rootless Gypsy subjects as charmed primitives or sleazy opportunists. Their attitudes toward them seem close, in fact, to the director's style -- floating, unresolved.