Love Affair, or, The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

Film Comment's Mark Harris wrote an article about what went on at the New York Film Festival fifty years ago (it was the fifth such festival) and a handful of the films are available on DVD, so I thought I'd take a look at them. The first is the oddly and superbly titled Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator.

The film is Yugoslavian, from director Dušan Makavejev, and is set in Belgrade, which of course was a communist country at the time. Although this film has elements of comedy, tragedy, and sex, it is really a political drama, as the film is punctuated with communist credos and propaganda, including a large banner of Lenin.

The slim plot (the film is only 68 minutes long) is about a switchboard operator (Eva Ras), a Hungarian girl. She enters a relationship with a Turkish man (Slobodan Aligrudić), who works for the sanitation department. They have some fun, and a lot of sex (for 1967, this film has a lot of nudity) but there are flash forwards that show us Ras' unfortunate fate.

There are also, strangely, scenes that seem to come out of Monty Python. The film starts with a sexologist explaining phallic rituals, and also includes a criminologist talking about the difficulty in murderers getting rid of bodies, and a sequence on rat infestations. Perhaps my favorite of these interstitial segments was a farmer explaining the wonders of the chicken egg.

Today this film is pleasant curiosity; I'm sure it meant much more to Serbians back in the day when they under the thumb of Tito. The film's lasting legacy is an image of Ras lying on her stomach, naked, with a black cat perched on her behind.