Korkoro | DVD Review

Franco-Romani director Tony Gatlif admirably eschews politics altogether and weaves a visually vibrant, deeply musical tribute to the little-known struggles of the gypsy population of Southern Europe during the Second World War.

It is perhaps a symptom of our national identity that in the United States we know as much about ‘gypsies’ as we might be said to know of ‘Indians’—it’s those people, in other words. It’s not at all something we should fault ourselves for, but the result of certain national realities—the story of the Holocaust is as resonant as it is in the United States because short of Israel, there is no other nation with a greater Jewish population than ours. By comparison, the long history of subjugation, expulsion and mass killings in countries in the Iberian peninsula (particularly Spain), along the Mediterranean and further up into the south of France, seems remarkably distant from us. It should come as no surprise, then, that something that often gets lost in our public conversation, if we can be said to sustain one at all, about the events of World War II is the fact that there were many other victims of the Third Reich beyond the Jewish population—gays, gypsies, the disabled, etc. And in that sense, Tony Gatlif is a rather invaluable key into those events for a country as far removed from them as ours.

The Franco-Romani director has made several films chronicling the struggles of the Romani people across Southern Europe, perhaps most notably 1993’s critical hit—and the film that put him on the map to begin with—Latcho Drom. In that film we see all of the characteristics that would become the hallmarks of Gatlif’s work: an almost religious belief in the power of music, a penchant for colorful, vertiginous imagery and an optimism of tone that persists even through the darkest of events. In Korkoro, Gatlif seems to have found his Sven Nykvist in cinematographer Julien Hirsch, who is actually the anti-Nykvist, employing a palette as restless and vivid as Nykvist’s was austere. Suffice it to say that grass has never looked greener in a film.

In relation to what for Gatlif was a creative landmark, Korkoro stands as his greatest achievement since. What does this mean? Korkoro is on a surface level very similar to Latcho Drom, but in another sense it is starkly different: it chooses to contextualize itself in terrain that remains steeped in controversy today, and it does so, ultimately, with a virtuosic panache worthy of the greatest directors of musicals in Europe, in particular the work of the remarkable Carlos Saura, a Spanish director whose 1986 musical, El amor brujo, deals with not dissimilar subject matter—a gypsy love/ghost story where the music reaches cosmic levels of transcendent expressiveness—set in dusty, sunny Andalusia. In the same way the music and the story meld together in Saura, so too does the music operate on a higher plane than as a soundtrack in Korkoro: the music, along with the imagery, is in many ways the saving grace of the film, a film that portrays events so dispiriting that were it not for the music it might approach unwatchable levels of depressiveness. This is not by accident, of course, because as in Saura’s gypsy ballet, the point being made is that it is the music that encapsulates, better than anything else, the gypsy spirit—an unflappable good humor, stoical but unresigned, in the face of the worst injustices.

In Korkoro we are told the story of a band of gypsies who paint old horses to sell them as if they were new ones and play music at entirely inappropriate intervals (brilliant comedic strokes both) and who in 1943 make their return to the village they used to haunt around and make a living in only to be whisked out of the camp they set up by Vichy authorities (none other, in fact, than the cabaret owner they once performed for, who has become an informer). They are later hidden by a French couple, the town’s veterinarian-mayor hybrid Théodore (Marc Lavoine) and a schoolteacher (Marie-Josée Croze) who is secretly a member of the French Resistance. In the end they are forced to flee even this home, as so many times before, when Vichy officers come to round them up and end up tearing through the couple’s house. In the final scene, they fail to make their escape and are stuffed into the back of a truck to be taken to Auschwitz (the viewer is told in white text before the credits roll). This is the plot, which is to say that there isn’t much of it to begin with, and what there is isn’t remarkably cheery material. And yet one walks away from the film with a paradoxical buoyancy of spirit, if that’s not too labored a formulation: there is a certain acceptance that many of them will die, even the affable Taloche (expertly portrayed by acrobat James Thiérrée), who becomes a vehicle for the film’s central message, but there is still a certain pleasure one takes in the way it is all executed.

As in Saura, the aesthetic accomplishment of the film clashes with the actual material the film is relating—and it is this strange paradox of form that makes the film worth watching at all. It never becomes at all political, something which can also be said of Latcho Drom, but always constrains its message to what certain sentimentalists might term ‘the human spirit.’ But I fear this is not supposed to be a characterless vessel of focus-group-tested Hollywood uplift—Korkoro achieves more aesthetic dignity than that. It is a film that portrays, deep within the character of Taloche, the natural yearning for freedom that exists parallel to the subrational drive toward self-imprisonment that resides in the human heart. In fact, it portrays this yearning for freedom (embodied in the title, which is a Romani cry for, ‘[We] want to be free’) as just another facet of that penchant for self-imprisonment—Taloche flails, lets himself fall, jumps on screen, plays the violin tirelessly (all of which recommends the casting of an acrobat, which was an inspired decision), and in many other ways is made—or makes himself—prey of his own passions. There is also an orphan, not Romani, who becomes entangled in their journey, and the most moving scene in the film is the one in which the orphan, Pétit Claude, is completely disowned by Taloche before the Vichy servicemen in order to spare his life. The thing is, Pétit Claude wants to stay—in the apparently open-ended ‘freedom’ of the gypsy lifestyle, which in this instance adds up to being stuffed into the back of a truck and shipped to a concentration camp, he sees more freedom than in being able to go off on his way.

The film itself is a pleasure to watch. Julien Hirsch’s cinematography is uniquely colorful and alive, and the bustling live soundtrack of Taloche and his band playing the violin makes it an extremely sensual and subtly moving experience. The disc comes with subtitles in English and a smattering of dispensable extras (trailers), but not much else in the way of supplementary material.

Korkoro is a fun, clever film with a protagonist in Taloche whom it seems always to be trying to catch up with, and the dynamic works well enough that the film’s surface pyrotechnics never begin to wear. It is in many ways a breathlessly paced film, and the only intervals when it seems to stop its steamrolling advance is when the band begins to play entirely at random, as in memorable a scene in the schoolteacher’s classroom when the children are singing the national anthem. As a historical film, its success is best measured by how well it navigates the political situation, and in this sense it is the exuberant and highly expressive form that ultimately makes the content not just bearable, but a minor pleasure.

Movie rating – 4

Disc Rating – 2.5