The title is a Gypsy term for "crazy outsider," and with his wild hair, broken shoes, and guileless quest, Stéphane (Romain Duris) fits the description. Armed only with a tape of a haunting Gypsy ballad and US currency mailed to him by his wealthy mother, the quixotic young Parisian plies the snowbound wastes of Romania in search of the singer of the song, which was beloved of his errant, recently deceased father.

A truck passes him on the road, in it a bloodied Gypsy youth in the custody of soldiers. He's the son of Izidor (a mugging and charismatic Isidor Serban), an irascible, bearded tribal elder and local musician whom Stéphane finds drunk and ranting in the village square in the middle of the night, denouncing the authorities who arrested his son in particular and the universal iniquities inflicted on Gypsies in general. His rage is good-natured, however, and after intimidating Stéphane into sharing his bottle and getting him drunk, he takes him back to his cottage and puts him into bed.

When he awakes, however, Stéphane must face a big head and the suspicious eyes of Izidor's neighbors, who lambaste this "gadjo" in their midst with the kind of epithets usually reserved for themselves. Tension darkens the film as their shouts of "chicken thief!" and "He's a bum" verge on violence, until Izidor returns and claims him as "my Parisian." Thereafter, with Izidor's help, Stéphane somewhat lackadaisically sets off on his search for the elusive chanteuse, in the process immersing himself in this alien culture and gradually earning its acceptance.

Gatlif understates this reversal of Gypsy and non-Gypsy roles and the theme of the oppressed outsider versus an intolerant society, but it lingers behind the overflowing passions of his episodic tale (a restraint unfortunately abandoned with the film's melodramatic climax). Equally low-key is the evolving father-son relationship between Izidor and Stéphane, as when the Gypsy elder offers the outsider his son's shoes. As with the serendipitous wanderings of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses, the universal ideas of paternity and usurpation underlie the superficial randomness of everyday -- and in this case, exotic -- experience.

The relationship takes on an Oedipal aspect when Stéphane is attracted to Sabina (a blowzy, sexy performance by Rona Hartner). She's a bit of an outsider too -- she fled her Belgian husband after she returned with him to his homeland, and her attitude toward Europeans and Gypsies alike is epitomized when she moons both. And of course she's a catalyst of sexual conflict -- this comes to a head in a disturbing scene following a dissolute visit to Bucharest in which Izidor begs Sabina to grant an old man "just a fuck" and Stéphane must come to her assistance. Far from idealizing the conditions of Gypsy life, Gatlif records it without apology: the squalor, the drunkenness, the scatology, and the sexism. From the beginning, when Stéphane asks a cartload of gaudily clad Gypsy maidens whether they know any music and is greeted with obscene lyrics, it's clear that Gatlif has no interest in rarefied clichés.

Not that Gadjo Dilo is an exposé of hardship and injustice, or a schematized allegory, despite its acute social consciousness and subtle metaphoric structure. Propelled by a raw, faux-vérité style of hand-held cameras and jagged editing, shot on location with a largely native cast (only Duris and Hartner appear to be professional actors), the events unreel with the spontaneity of real life and the synchronicity of a dream.

Such moments as when Izidor calls on a musician friend, discovers he is dead, and does an impromptu dance of mourning by the graveside, accompanied by a homunculus accordionist with the voice of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, touch on transcendence. Another scene, in which Stéphane jury-rigs a gramophone out of odds and ends to play a record hanging on Izidor's wall, sums up Gatlif's method of achieving art and reconciliation from the rough given of the world. "It's a miracle," a listener observes; so too, in the end, is the film.