Dušan Makavejev was the Serbian creator of the incendiary 1971 movie WR: Mysteries of the Organism, the final word in that title destined forever to be misread as “orgasm”. He was a satirist, political subversive and eroto-evangelist, a performance artist of ex-Yugoslavia’s cinematic Black Wave. Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator is an early work from 1967, a brilliant pulp classic which showed that the 1960s could swing behind the iron curtain. I wonder: did anything in the French new wave measure up to this level of nihilist black humour? Godard gave us Breathless; Makavejev gave us an actual breathless corpse.
It’s about a bored young woman working for a telephone exchange: she wears an audio headset, pushing plugs into sockets and putting people through. She falls in love with an intense young man employed in plumbing and waterworks, but cheats on him with the sleazy postman to the murderous rage of her new boyfriend – and vanishes. The result is something insouciantly explicit and disturbing that defies classification. The action is bisected with digressive lectures on sexology and criminology, with slogans flashed up on screen, clips from Soviet propaganda movies, fourth walls broken. You might call it a forensic crime comedy because the love affair is interspersed with autopsy scenes of the young woman’s corpse: a truly chilling juxtaposition.
Izabela (Eva Ras) works on the switchboard alongside her friend Ruza (Ruzica Sokic), a job fraught with the symbolism of connection and communication. They are always having to fend off the approaches of Mica (Miodrag Andric), a guy who delivers telegrams on his motorbike. Walking on the streets one day, Izabela and Ruza run into Ahmed (Slobodan Aligrudic), a charmingly shy young man and a Muslim; he drolly refers to himself as a “Turk”. Later when he gets Izabela pregnant, he cheerfully says: “You’ll bear me a little Turkish janissary!” They begin a fervent affair, and more or less move in together in Izabela’s little flat, but when she is left alone for a month while Ahmed is away, her yearning physical dissatisfactions are exploited by Mica.
The film is about politics, sex and death. Or mostly sex and death. Or mostly sex. Sex is the great rebellion in this film, and the great warning. Izabela is killed by a male figure who for all his own unorthodoxy and boozy indiscipline is a submissive follower of the party line. Sex can be an apolitical form of conflict; it does not explicitly exist in opposition to the government, but the erotic mode is revolutionary by its very nature. This film is a short, sharp shock of exhilaration and artistic dissent.
• Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator is available from 17 August on Klassiki.
