An exuberant run through the woods that addresses orientalism and racism through the rough and tumble relationship between a French tourist and a village of Rumanian gypsies who take him in. The tourist is none other than Romain Duris, the enigmatic drummer from Cherche Chacun Son Chat (When the Cat's Away), and this film retains a similar warmth and honesty in the faces of its characters. The use of real people instead of actors gives an authenticity to their boisterous parties, drunken outbursts, buttock-pinching, slapping and dancing. The film posesses a raw quality that breaks through the prettiness of the pictures like a gravel rash, suffusing the viewer with great affection for the characters, warmed by the drunken stumble of the narrative, open to the anxious moments when the political becomes profane.
The 'real-life' gypsies are served up slightly well-done, the side-dressing perhaps a little too colourful. Sweat and soil, a wedding, a funeral, a quick roustabout on the forest floor. Delinquency and delight, music and mating. But cynicism does not sit well with this living, breathing thing. Like good vodka the friendship between Izidor and Romain leaves a tingling aftertaste in the chest, and any nagging doubts as to the cultural exploitation of these gypsies is crushed with the Frenchman's DAT tapes, a symbolic counter to the predictable sexual conquest of the village's headstrong beauty (the gloriously onomatopoeic Rona Hartner) by the charming French intruder.
Culture cannot be traded without compromise, exoticism is always that which you seek to find of yourself, in the other. And the reality of the exotic cannot be documented except as that which is performed in front of the camera, or that which they see as already inside the outsider. A wish, a dream, an eagerness to trade cigarettes, car-rides and chocolates. An exotic experience they can take home with them as a trophy of their individuality. It's the double-bind of the westerner who demands the eastern experience, yet is appalled by the presence of poverty, the caste system of consumerism. Complicity is slow to surface in the tourist, but director Gatlif is careful to engineer it in both his Frenchman and the cinema-voyeur. 
Whilst his earlier project, Latcho Drom, was wary of its fictive robes, Gadjo Dilo is a naked dream: both inside and outside. It is, perhaps, a little confusing, but beauty is so easily forgiven. You may not come away from this film feeling better about yourself, but at least you'll feel better about cinema. And whilst the gypsies disappear, there is always hope! Like cinema, the dancers may die, but the song plays on. The only danger in transit from dream to dream, that our memories of youth flash past as blurred scenery, on the other side of the car window.
eugene chew
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want more? read a review by gypsy researcher, louis proyect