Movies attempt to create reality for us, the audience, out of fantasy. When you're a filmmaker like Tony Gatlif who made Latcho Drom you're already halfway there because he takes a reality and inserts a fiction. With Gadjo Dilo, he once again enters the world of gypsies.
It's midwinter in Romania and Stephane - Romain Duris - is wandering through remote regions of the country trying to find a singer which his father had recorded on tape. He meets up with a drunken gypsy Izidor - Izidor Serban - a man of extreme emotions with an unbounded capacity for joy, for anguish and for vodka. Izidor's son has just been sent to gaol for six months so it's natural for Izidor to want to adopt Stephane whom he takes home almost like a prize possession. He makes it impossible for Stephane to leave. Stephane finds himself being seduced by the gypsy zest for life, especially when he meets Sabine - Rona Hartner.
Gadjo Dilo is a very seductive film, because you feel what you are seeing has a truth to it that goes beyond normal fictional filmmaking. And while Tony Gatlif celebrates gypsy life and music he exposes their plight as outsiders in Romania with subtlety and compassion.
The film is rich in language - gypsy love talk is pretty direct, their casual insults are colourful in a sexually explicit way - and it's rich in humanness. Izidor is the core of the film, it's really his story we're witnessing, and he's a wonderful film character. But it's rich in details too - Izidor's gypsy tribe are wary of this stranger, they worry that he's going to steal their women or their chickens. Playing against such reality could be a challenge but Romain Duris just sort of fits into this colourful world so easily, as does Rona Hartner. It's a rewarding experience to go along with this crazy film and become, just for a little while, part of another community, part of another way of life.
