Just about as good as a coming-of-age story can get. With the heart of “400 Blows” and the humor of “Fireman’s Ball,” “Do You Remember, Dolly Bell?” has little of the antic and exaggerate pace you’ll find in Kusturica’s later masterpieces “Underground” or “Black Cat, White Cat.” This is a simpler story: the painful quirks of an extended family, the camaraderie of dopey friends, the joy and pain of first love. Some of the tropes start out familiar (the saintly prostitute, the local tough, the sick paterfamilias) but storylines never quite end up where you expect them. Marxism, hypnotism, Italian pop songs, pet rabbits, picnics in the rain, stolen cigarettes, a youth counselor who looks like Brian Lehrer. There’s nothing about this movie that isn’t fantastic. That’s a weird way to put it. Let’s try again. It’s fantastic.
Here’s something that is a little bit of a spoiler, I guess, so I will put it down here.
In one of the last scenes of the movie, we learn that the family is Muslim. “Face the body toward Mecca” they say. I was pretty stunned. The father makes a big deal about being a devout communist, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie with Muslim characters behaving so secularly without mentioning, at least once, their Muslim-ness, you know what I mean.
Anyway, I was reading about Kusurica online and discovered that the family in “Dolly Bell” mirrors his own quite a bit. To wit:
On Đurđevdan (St. George’s Day) in 2005 Emir, was baptised into the Serb Orthodox Church as Nemanja Kusturica in Savina monastery near Herceg Novi, Montenegro.[3][4] To his critics who considered that this was the final betrayal of his Muslim roots [3], he replied that: “My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. OK, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were Orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks.”[5]
I just find this kinda fascinating in that it doesn’t come up in his other films. (Or maybe it does and I am just missing it.)
Watch ‘Super 8 Stories’ – the documentary he did on his rock band – watch that behavior and come back and tell me this doesn’t surprise you a little bit.