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14-08-2023, 04:23 PM
Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator review – dissident sex and death
A Yugoslavian pulp classic from 1967, this tale of a young woman’s erotic misadventures more than matches the French new wave for black humourDušan Makavejev was the Serbian creator of the incendiary 1971 movie WR: Mysteries of the Organism, the final word in that title destined forever to be misread as “orgasm”. He was a satirist, political subversive and eroto-evangelist, a performance artist of ex-Yugoslavia’s cinematic Black Wave. Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator is an early work from 1967, a brilliant pulp classic which showed that the 1960s could swing behind the iron curtain. I wonder: did anything in the French new wave measure up to this level of nihilist black humour? Godard gave us Breathless; Makavejev gave us an actual breathless corpse.It’s about a bored young woman working for a telephone exchange: she wears an audio headset, pushing plugs into sockets and putting people through. She falls in love with an intense young man employed in plumbing and waterworks, but cheats on him with the sleazy postman to the murderous rage of her new boyfriend – and vanishes. The result is something insouciantly explicit and disturbing that defies classification. The action is bisected with digressive lectures on sexology and criminology, with slogans flashed up on screen, clips from Soviet propaganda movies, fourth walls broken. You might call it a forensic crime comedy because the love affair is interspersed with autopsy scenes of the young woman’s corpse: a truly chilling juxtaposition. Continue reading...
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/au...-and-death
#Film #Drama_films #Romance_films #Crime_films #Serbia
A Yugoslavian pulp classic from 1967, this tale of a young woman’s erotic misadventures more than matches the French new wave for black humourDušan Makavejev was the Serbian creator of the incendiary 1971 movie WR: Mysteries of the Organism, the final word in that title destined forever to be misread as “orgasm”. He was a satirist, political subversive and eroto-evangelist, a performance artist of ex-Yugoslavia’s cinematic Black Wave. Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator is an early work from 1967, a brilliant pulp classic which showed that the 1960s could swing behind the iron curtain. I wonder: did anything in the French new wave measure up to this level of nihilist black humour? Godard gave us Breathless; Makavejev gave us an actual breathless corpse.It’s about a bored young woman working for a telephone exchange: she wears an audio headset, pushing plugs into sockets and putting people through. She falls in love with an intense young man employed in plumbing and waterworks, but cheats on him with the sleazy postman to the murderous rage of her new boyfriend – and vanishes. The result is something insouciantly explicit and disturbing that defies classification. The action is bisected with digressive lectures on sexology and criminology, with slogans flashed up on screen, clips from Soviet propaganda movies, fourth walls broken. You might call it a forensic crime comedy because the love affair is interspersed with autopsy scenes of the young woman’s corpse: a truly chilling juxtaposition. Continue reading...
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/au...-and-death
#Film #Drama_films #Romance_films #Crime_films #Serbia
