Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

Izabela works on a telephone switchboard. Ahmed is a sanitation officer who deals with exterminating rats. They meet, they move in together, and it goes well. But within its first minutes the film shows a woman's body being lifted out of a well, so the ending is known from the start. The narrative works over how it happened. Dušan Makavejev writes and directs. Eva Ras plays Izabela and Slobodan Aligrudić plays Ahmed. The structure is in pieces. Lectures delivered straight to camera by a real sexologist and a forensic specialist are cut into the love story, along with old propaganda footage. The material moves constantly between fiction and explanation. It is among the best known works of the Yugoslav Black Wave, a movement that stepped outside socialist realism and was suppressed by the authorities after a few years; Makavejev had to leave the country over his later films. Sexuality is at the centre and unusually explicit for the year it appeared. The political side is never stated; it sits in the editing, in a story about private life being interrupted again and again by an official voice. Who it is for: anyone interested in sixties Eastern European cinema and formal experiment. Who it is not for: the structure is deliberately scattered, the lecture sections break the narrative, and it is not for a viewer expecting a straight love story.