Gypsies ride into the sunset

Press, 5 June 1978, Page 8

Gypsies ride into the sunset

Gypsy life ain’t what it used to be, moans an oldie at the start of “The Gypsy Camp Vanishes Into the Blue,” the Russian film at the Academy. The yearning for money in 1900 Russia is getting in the way of freedom, women are dreadful deceivers, men who steal horses and are beguiled by witches are bound to meet a bad end. For a while, it seems to be a game of Top that Gypsy Maxim, but the film’s writers wisely crammed most of the gypsyisms into the first few minutes. Then they let the scenery, horses, dancing and music take over.

Even an inevitable allusion to the coming revolution is downplayed so much that it slides by. Officers drinking toasts to the 20th Century, while their horses are stolen by

the gypsies, ask each other what is in store for the next 100 years.

The stars are contradictory, says one, but they

show the end of the world will come in 16 years.

Full of action, passion and comic turns, the film has nothing new or particularly significant to say about gypsy life. Its makers probably did not intend anything beyond an entertainment. At that level — with its hodgepodge of film styles — it is Very good. It is pretty to watch.

with almost too many atmospheric scenes of rural Russia crossed by gypsywaggons. Its treatment of landscape and the people in it is much like the RussianJapanese production of ■Kurosawa’s "Dersu Uzaia,” the story of a Mongolian hunter, that was in Christchurch last year. An English title for the film should probably be “The Gypsy Camp Disappears Into the Sunset,” since so many of the wanderers do just that with regularity. And there are as many scenes of riders profiled against sunrises. Trendy zooms and pullbacks are avoided. When the horse thieves are surrounded by soldiers, the camera sits and slowly cir-

cles with the trapped men, who ride their horses counter to the surrounding ring so they can break swiftly out of their captors’ orbit. Any camera work that can keep the viewer from getting dizzy while constantly whirling is pretty good . On one level, “Gypsy Camp” is a musical western with a comic sidekick for. the anti-hero (he steals hens because he is too ugly to steal women) and Fate Morning large. The audience is softened up for the sudden ending by constant references, none tod subtle, to Zobar being obsessed with a mysterious gypsy girl who will be his ruin.

AT THE CINEMA Stan Darling