Jimmy Barka is a young lad in a village without perspective. After finishing his part time job at a farm, he is unemployed again. He sets off to wander the countryside, but loses his girlfriend Lilica during an incident where he tried to steal from some workers. He meets a singer, Duška, but when she falls for a rich businessman, Jimmy leaves in disgust. In another village, he meets dentist Bojana. In Belgrade, there is a singing contest, and Jimmy enlists, but is such a terrible singer he is booed from the stage. He meets Lilica again, who earns money by having sex with men and then faking she is pregnant, forcing them to pay for a nonexistent abortion. One such man, Milutin, realizes he’s been scammed and wants to rape Lilica. Jimmy intervenes and throws him out of the house. Milutin later shoots and kills Jimmy, who's been sitting in a wooden field toilet.
One of the most hyped movies of the Yugoslav Black Wave in cinema, “When I Am Dead and Gone” is a bitter allegory that captured the 'zeitgeist' of both the uncertain future that young people are faced with who cannot find a job, and a feeling of an existential emptiness, futility in the Balkans, where nothing ever changes and people are always doomed to fail, no matter what they try. It is not that fresh anymore, yet is still a notable and naturalistic little film of the director Zivojin Pavlovic, with remarkably thought provocative moments at time, in which the notion of a Yugoslav “socialist paradise” is dismantled through realistic-cynical depictions of the anti-hero Jimmy (excellent Dragan Nikolic) who cannot find a job, steals, becomes a scammer to survive, whereas the workers are constantly on strike. In one scene, when his girlfriend complains that she is hungry, Jimmy replies: “If our comrades were also hungry during the war, then we can be, too”, missing the point that the said crisis situation remained unchanged even during peacetime. Assembled out of a very loose episodic structure, in which the protagonist travels from place to place, unable to get a hold of his life anywhere, "When I Am Dead and Gone" is by its theme very similar to Schlesinger's "Midnight Cowboy" and Rafelson's "Five Easy Pieces", an existentialist road movie where neither the quest nor the goal are clearly defined, though with a lot of humor. In one such humorous moment near the start, a man in a house questions Jimmy who entered inside, inquiring about a woman living there ("Why are you asking about her for?" - "Because I need her." - "You need her? She is my wife!" - "She is my mother!"), whereas the finale features a long, almost 10-minute sequence of a singer talent show, with a band in Belgrade doing a surprisingly catchy take on "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees. Despite a rather overstretched feel at times, Pavlovic crafted an effective film about a search for a better life, which feels fresh at times.
Grade:++
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