The film opens promisingly enough, with 10-year-old Max (older-looking Oscar Copp) scoping out an alleyway hoping to score not drugs but a guitar. Max is staying with his grandmother in an affluent neighbourhood in France's Elzas just outside of a Manouche community, and he's heard there's a person named Swing (the androgynous young lady Lou Reche) trading an axe that belonged to jazz legend Django Reinhardt. Max gets, er, gypped, of course, but he doesn't miss his Sony Discman once he starts taking lessons from Miraldo (Tchavolo Schmitt), for whom he writes letters to welfare in exchange. (Most residents of the Manouche caravan are illiterate.) Despite what the press notes say ("music becomes [Max's] passion"), Max is soon faking headaches to get out of practice so he can hang with Swing.

Max and Swing's relationship is summed up by the repeat gesture of the two glancing at each other and breaking into a fit of giggles. They swim and pick flowers, yet there's nothing wanton about the relationship in the way of our pre-pubescent fumblings--only the diary Max keeps identifies his growing affection for her. Likewise, when the Manouche denizens gather to play songs of interminable length, it should be orgiastic: though the Manouche in Swing live by a code of hedonism, Gatlif's is a gaze peculiar in its lack of sensuousness (peculiar for his having written a film with such romantic pretensions) that sucks all the joy out of the music. Insulting our emotional intelligence, a climactic tragedy and radical last-scene shift in the storytelling's point-of-view transform Swing in its final moments from a picture that elicits a shrug into one that inspires contempt.-Bill Chambers