The film is a worthy follow-up (or residue?) of the golden age of Czechoslovak cinema - the sixties. Quirky poetics infiltrates the reality of an adolescent love story between a postman and a Roma (Gypsy) girl in a small Slovak town. We also can consider it the opposite way - quirky reality infiltrates the poetics, since the scenes of the lovers' life together, after they escaped to the city, are a complete antithesis to their idealized relationship back home. The following is a possible SPOILER!!!, but it hardly matters in a lyrical film like this. It is the boldness of the director and the screenwriter that makes this film so great: the two romantically longing teens are actually given the opportunity to live together and share the mundane problems of finding work and a place to live, before they find out that their relationship cannot bear the burden of every-day life. The warm and charming film thus gets some tragic overtones towards the end, but our heroes cope quite well, unlike the young Werther... The portrayal of different lifestyles of Gypsies and gadjos (non-gypsies) is noteworthy in its realism - there does not seem to be an easy solution to that problem. In summary, Ruzove sny (1976) is a hidden gem of a film that deserves better - to my knowledge, it is not available on video even in its country of origin.
Review of Ruzové sny
