Do You Remember Dolly Bell?

1981 [SH]

Comedy / Drama / Romance

3
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 90% · 4 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 90% · 1K ratings
IMDb Rating 7.5/10 10 7246 7.2K

coming of age boy band 1960s

Plot summary

A young man grows up in Sarajevo in the 1960s, under the shadow of his good, but ailing father, and gets attracted by the world of small-time criminals.

720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
1007.97 MB
1280*720
Sh 2.0
NR
Subtitles us   cn   ro  
24 fps
1 hr 49 min
Seeds 3
1.83 GB
1920*1080
Sh 2.0
NR
Subtitles us   cn   ro  
24 fps
1 hr 49 min
Seeds 14

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by Ordet 9 / 10

art outlasts politics

Seeing "Dolly Bell" during the recent war in Kosovo forced me to think of the political significance of the film. Almost twenty years after the film was made, Yugoslavia is an extraordinarily different place, albeit one in which traditions die hard. But whether considered in relation to the Yugoslavia of the early 80s or to today's Serbia, what impresses about "Dolly Bell" is its filmmakers' devotion to art and the human condition rather than to a political agenda. It has not become an artifact because it was made to provoke human sympathy, not political reaction. "Dolly Bell" is not a tragicomic masterpiece like "Underground" nor a celebration of optimism and levity in the face of absurdity and injustice as are "When Father Was Away on Business" and "Time of the Gypsies": it is not Kusturica's most clever film, but it is perhaps his most enduring.
Reviewed by howard.schumann 8 / 10

Coming of age in Sarajevo

Emir Kusturica's first film Do You Remember Dolly Bell? is a bittersweet comedy set in the former Yugoslavia during the 1960s. The film, which won the Golden Lion Prize at the 1981 Venice Film Festival, is both a coming of age story and a tribute to the city of Sarajevo, long before it was devastated by civil war. To the chagrin of his strict Communist father (Slobodan Aligrudic), sixteen-year old Dino (Slavo Stimac) is more into hypnosis and self-help mantras than Marxist ideology. He recites the phrase "Every day in every way I'm getting better and better" and sings in a new band mandated by the local Eastern European bureaucracy as they relax the Communist grip and allow some influence of Western culture.Dino's family of six live in a cramped one-room house while they wait for state housing. The father drinks excessively and the family is poor. This is underscored when, during a visit to relatives, the youngest boy makes a point of saying how much he wishes he had a bicycle like the one he sees in the relative's home. Through Dino's relationship with Sonny, an unsavory pimp, he meets a cabaret singer and prostitute Dolly Bell (Ljiljana Blagojevic), named after a stripper in an Italian film they had seen recently at the Culture Club. Dolly is forced by Sonny to wait in the attic of Dino's home until he returns and Dino is a passive onlooker as a band of delinquent boys take their turn with her.Dino's sweet innocence captivates the young girl, however, and the two form a bond that results in Dino's sexual initiation and first love affair. Dino has to cope with his father's illness, a lung cancer that has become life-threatening and their days together reveal a much mellower man who tells Dino he knew about the girl in the loft and no longer disapproves his using hypnosis and auto-suggestion. While Dolly Bell lacks the polish and cinematic flair of Kusturica's later work, it is an honest and intelligent film, one that avoids sentimentality and provides compelling insight into what it meant to grow up in Eastern Europe during the sixties.
Reviewed by deee-2 9 / 10

Unique&excellent...

I've seen this piece very shortly after I've seen Underground(which is my personal no.1). I was prepared for another energy daredevil movie trip into metaphor and symbolism - I was surprised and pleased ... Kusturica has shown ability to produce two absolutely different movies - both superb!Do you remember Dolly Bell? is funny, sad, romantic, mystic ... and it is real, it is not a movie to go for if you are not in a mood to think and think a lot ... it is a movie about communism and its philosophy as understood by each generation - I've lived those times and I accept: this is not the typical life we lived, but it defines the essence of how we felt and what we did...
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