Autobiography of Nicolae Caucescu (Saturday, September 10, 2011) (

OK - so I admit that I have a never-ending boner for anything Romanian these days, but this is such an amazing film it's hard not to be totally bowled over by it. It's 3+ hours of found footage of Commerade Nicolae Caucescu official films (with some home movies thrown in for texture in a few places) cut together as an "autobiography". As a theoretical piece it's one of the most interesting pieces in a long time (at least since Alexander Olch's The Windmill Movie, an autobio-doc made by a third party). It brings up important questions about what makes an "autobiography" and what makes a "documentary". The suggestion here is that Caucescu's persona was a creation of the Party, therefore his autobiography would be a creation of texts (films) of him in an official capacity. The suggestion is that there was no there there with him from a psychological point of view, so his autobiography is simply a superficial view of him looking at stuff (mostly of parades). This totally brings to mind Kundera's assertion that commies loved parades and how fabricated they are themselves. (Who walks down streets to music and choreography... and then who would think they're anything but concocted simulacra of reality?) It is a marathon in length, but I think that's part of the point as well: aside from the formal qualities of contemporary Romanian narrative pictures, only a megalomaniac could create an "autobiography" that was so long.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Tales from the Golden Age (Sunday, August 28, 2011) (76)

Tales from the Golden Age is a collection of six comedic film shorts all about life in Romania around the end of the Communist era of the mid- to late-80s, what Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu called "The Golden Age". All the films are written by Christian Mungiu, whose brilliant 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days set a benchmark a few years ago for what Romanian New Wave cynicism and aesthetics could look like.



Here, Mungiu works with five young directors to make the films, each one with a style that doesn't not seem to show the wonderful formalism of the movement: no long takes and no static shots. (Strangely the neither the credits nor imdb seem to say exactly who made which movies; the official website only mentions a few specific directors and films... oh, to be a real movie reviewer who gets press kits.)



The six shorts are mostly unconnected, but generally deal with the poverty of the era and how Romanians got along with subverting the official orders of the Communist party and bureaucratic suits, how the system was clearly too complex and top-heavy to survive. They each tell the story of so-called "legends" (urban legends) that persisted in the era, mostly about people who got away with naughtiness or ridiculous stories that could only come from a repressive, ridiculous system. They move on a string from short and silly to longer with a darker, more cynical humor. They are as follows:



1) The Legend of the Official Visit: A small village has to prepare for the official visit of a group of Party elites; just as they get everything set, the plans change, leaving the villagers bitter. (There's some hilarious puking in this one.)



2) The Legend of the Party Photographer (directed by Hanno Höfer): A group of Party officials have to correct a photograph of Ceausescu to make him look taller and not subservient to his Western guest.



3) The Legend of the Zealous Party Activist (directed by Ioana Uricaru): An urban Party activist tries to teach rural farmers to read and take better care of themselves.



4) The Legend of the Greedy Policeman: A family tries to hide a pig in their public housing apartment and kill and butcher it before a holiday.



5) The Legend of the Air Sellers: A high school girl tries to get enough money to go on a school trip by collecting bottles from her neighbors, saying she's a government official needing to do a scientific experiment.



6) The Legend of the Chicken Driver: A driver of live chickens figures out a way to make a bit of cash by selling left-over eggs laid by the chickens in his delivery truck.



Some of these are better than others (I particularly like the first two and the fifth), some of them are a bit more serious and drawn out (the second three).



At times this film feels a bit like Kieslowski's The Decalogue, a result of setting some of the stories in public housing blocks (all Communist-era public housing blocks in Eastern Europe looked alike, apparently) and the balance of absurd officiousness and absurd comedy; at times this feels like a Kusturica send-up of Yugoslavia and people doing silly things that they think are serious (there are no Romany here, but some of the rural people seem as capricious as Kusturica's gypsies). (I'm not saying all Eastern European movies are the same, I guess it's the Communist aesthetic that I'm responding to.)



This is a fun film, but not really an important one for the Romanian New Wave. It's an interesting analysis of politics on the ground during this era, but it's lessons are rather simple.



I'm a bit upset that it so greatly veers away from the slow and direct style of other films from the Romanian New Wave, but I guess that's the nature of movements - they move on and change over time.

Stars: 3 of 4

Aurora (Sunday, July 3, 2011) (49)

Cristi Puiu's first major film to be released in the States, The Death of Mr. Lasarescu (2006), is an amazing existentialist story of life and death in Post-Communist Bucharest. It is the most successful and greatest of the Romanian New Wave films to hit these shores, incredibly simple in story (a man slowly dies over the course of 150 minutes and we watch unable to do anything about it), reserved but powerful in style and devoid of any real structure. It's the very definition of the RomWave. In his newest film, Aurora, which he wrote, stars in and directs, Puiu brings us another brilliant work, this time even more obscure and more unlike anything we've seen before... and this time adds another half hour of content.

The story of the film is so very unclear (or unknown), that it's enough to just know the basic characters involved. Viorel (Puiu) is a 40-something man with two young daughters and a woman who seems to be his wife. He also has an elderly mother he looks after and she has a new husband who he hates. The film opens with him talking about the daughters with his wife in the kitchen as she gets dressed. She gives him a bag lunch and sends him off. For the next 45 minutes or so he wanders around with no particular direction, at some point buying a shotgun. It is never totally clear that he has a job or anywhere to be and circles back to places he has already been several times.

Unlike Mr. Lasarescu, and unlike Radu Muntean's recent Tuesday, After Christmas, this is not really about the brokenness of Bucharest and the old Communisty aesthetic, nor is it about how the city is a modern European capital. It falls somewhere in between. We see the back allies and rail yards (which look crappy in any town in the world), and also see the fancy boutiques on the boulevard.

When action does pick up a bit (it never really gets much faster than a crawl, but at some point there are a few things that happen) there is a sense that there is an everyday human level to living and a separate "rule-of-law" world of right and wrong, but the two remain separate. This is not too dissimilar from Puiu's comment in Mr. Lasarescu, that people die and the system can't help them, though in that it's rather directed at the whole system (hospitals, medical care, ambulances), while here it's more directly existentialist about the inevitability of stuff and the fact that the police (or lack of them) are an agent, but not the pure cause of badness. Viorel never rushes, he never panics, he walks and drives around carefully, knowing full well that he is heading in a specific direction.

It's impossible to proceed without mentioning all that the story owes to Camus, Sartre, Becket, Antonini and Bergman. It is clear that Puiu is a good reader and watcher and that he's studied his nihilistic absurdest existentialists. Life for Viorel is a series of moments that connect to one another; for us, however, his story is somewhat choppy and sometimes unmotivated. Puiu never gives us much background on actions. Viorel does things that don't totally make sense and then we have to either guss at their meanings or wait until they're explained (three hours later). In this way, Puiu puts us in the story by showing us that life is about randomness and non-understanding. Puiu might have a direction, but it's unclear to everyone else. Life for us is about experiencing other people as they go about their business without explaining thier actions to us. This hyperrealism is one of the keys of the RomWave and it is fantastic.

Just because the film is 181 minutes long, doesn't mean it's boring or dull. One of my favorite things about the film is the amazing dialogue and the fact that Puiu's script is full of jokes and humor. Yes, most of it is dark comedy, but it's very entertaining, particularly toward the end, when Viorel's tour is revealed to us a bit more. He's the world's greatest baadasssss, at times talking back to school teachers and kindergarten classmates of his daughters, insulting his mother's new beau or scolding the police. He says what we all wish we could say, but don't figure out until it's a minute too late. (There's also a fantastic piss joke around minute 178.)

I'm a bit stumped by the title of the film. I guess this is about the dawn of a new day for Viorel, or possibly a dawn of a new era for Bucharest and Romania. Perhaps it refers to how when we see stars and light they're actually gone light years ago or that there is no substance to lights in the sky, but just gasses and electricity. All of this connects to Viorel's situation, that we don't really notice him until he does something big or talks back to others.

Stars: 4 of 4

Tuesday, After Christmas (Tuesday, June 7, 2011) (40)

Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas opens with a man and a woman in bed talking after sex. They chat about mundane stuff like the length of his toes and the towns where they're from for about 10 minutes and it is all shown in one-take. This, of course, is a typical scene from the so-called Romanian New Wave. There is very little cutting and a minimal amount of camera movements or changes of focus; there is no score, there are no special effects, almost everything is shot in interiors with unchanging lighting.

Unlike previous RomWave films (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days; 12:08 East of Bucharest; The Death of Mr Lasarescu) the world of this film it totally contemporary and filled with the same new and expensive stuff that we would see in North America or Western Europe - elegant cars, Apple laptops, iPhones, clean dentist offices. This world looks much more like Paris than the Bucharest of Police, Adjective (I don't know if this is a thematic decision saying that contemporary Romania is not what you've seen in recent movies. I don't know enough about contemporary Romania or how accurate those other films are.)

Unlike those other films, however, this one doesn't really have much of a plot. Paul (Mimi Branescu), the man in the opening scene, is a married father in his late-30s who is having an affair with Raluca (Maria Popistasu), the woman in that scene. She's actually his daughter's dentist, and is more than a decade younger than he is. She enjoys the time the two of them spend together and never asks him to leave his wife Adriana (Mirela Oprisor) to date her officially. Paul has other ideas, and decides to spring the news of the affair on Adriana just before Christmas, making the holiday, which they spend with his parents, incredibly difficult.

What is really wonderful about this film is that it doesn't have any of the political/social commentary that you find in a lot of the RomWave films, this is just a slice of life drama, a story about regular people doing what people do. There is as much content in what we don't see onscreen as what we do see. The title refers to the day after the holiday when Raluca is supposed to return to Bucharest from her parents house out of town - the day when Paul and Raluca's life together will begin. But we never actually get to this day as the film ends on Christmas Eve. The suggestion is that we never ultimately know what happens on that day. Paul has rashly forced his will on his wife, daughter and mistress, without considering the effects it will cause.

One of the most emotionally searing scenes in RomWave for me was in 4 Months during the dinner party where we see Otilia sitting at a table with people talking nonsense while she is thinking about her friend, Gabita, getting an abortion from a monster of a doctor. The long, long take with a static camera and wide-angle lens makes us fidgety in our seats wanting to move on to the next break. In Tuesday, we get this discomfort at almost equal level during a sequence when Paul and Adriana take their daughter to Raluca for a dentist appointment. It's clear that Raluca is in terrible emotional pain, but can't show it, for fear of tipping Adriana to the relationship. Again here we see it with a static shot from across the exam room, nervous at the unblinking, voyeristic quality of the shot.

But I think Muntean actually goes a bit farther than his RomWave colleagues by using lenses in a magnificent way. The first part of the film is shot mostly in tight shots with normal or wide-angle lenses, giving a naturalistic quality to the action. There's actually a beautiful rack focus in the first scene that switches from Paul to Adriana and back as they talk. At the point Paul tells Adriana about his affair, there is a switch to longer lenses, making certain action in the foreground seem intimate and close and separating us (and the actors) from the out-of-focus background. This wonderfully mirrors the isolation they feel respectively and is a visual reminder that Paul changed his life and the lives of his loved ones (including Raluca) irreversibly.

There's a wonderful motif that runs through the film of gifts and gift giving. Considering it's Christmas, the adults are all excited to be buying gifts for the daughter (there's a funny sequence where Paul and Adriana have to buy themselves gifts that will be given to themselves by his parents). In many ways, Paul sees his confession to his wife as a gift to Raluca - but it's a gift she might not want. One could see the lush life of these Bucharesters and the lavish gifts they exchange (the daughter gets a snowboard from her parents) as a commentary on the way Romanians have embraced capitalism after years of communist misery, though I think the film works well without such political dialectics.

This is possibly the most small-scale, intimate and subtle RomWave film I've seen, but I think it ranks in the top tier of the class. The acting, particularly by Branescu and Popistasu is wonderful, and the direction by Muntean and script by Muntean, Alexandru Baciu and Razvan Radulescu is nuanced and elegant. It has a beautiful look overall and a very interesting storyline.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Police, Adjective (Wednesday, December 23, 2009) (207)

It is now clear that we are in the midst of a remarkable period of Romanian neo-realist film. In recent years, there have been a few Romanian directors who have released several remarkable films, each with their own individual subject matter, but each with a fantastic style and aesthetic that is totally fresh and remarkable in cinema. In 2006, there was Cristi Puiu's tragic The Death of Mr. Lasarescu; in 2007, there was Corneliu Porumboiu's bittersweet 12:08 East of Bucharest; in 2008 there was Crisrian Mungiu's frightening and frank 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days; and 2009 brought us Porumboiu's exhaustive and amazing Police, Adjective.

I'm not sure if there is a specific movement here per se, or if there is some sort of parallel evolution of style, but all of these films deal with reality in their country in the same, slow and pensive way. Each director uses extremely long takes with static shots and a minimal amount of cutting. Scenes take 15 or 20 minutes to develop as a standard and there might only be three shots in that period.

In Police, Adjective, beat cop Cristi is assigned to tail a high school student who is smoking pot after class with two friends. It seems that the police brass think that this kid can lead them to some big drug supplier into their town. As he follows the boy for days upon days, he gets more and more frustrated with the silly case and questions its value to his superiors. It's a very simple story, but this is not really about the narrative as much as it is an examination of post-communist Romanian culture and the texture of life in the country.

Porumboiu does a magnificent job here putting us in the bleak environment. Each scene in this film runs at least 15 minutes long and they are each composed of static shots that go on well past a point where it is comfortable to watch. The discomfort is what is amazing about this picture. You want to look away, but you cant. There is no score and what seems to be natural, dull, yellow lighting. The mundane qualities of the of each scene is what is totally beautiful about this film. There is minimal talking throughout, leading to a cold, isolating feeling - and when there is dialogue it comes in giant bursts like thunder.

In one scene, Cristi gets home from work and enters his modest flat. His wife is in the sitting room and tells him that his dinner is in the kitchen. He goes to the kitchen, gets a bowl of soup and some bread and begins to eat. As he eats, we hear a Romanian pop song being played by his wife on the computer. He eats the bowl of soup and then goes into the sitting room and sits next to his wife. This all takes about 10 minutes and is all one uncut shot. He then begins a long dialogue with his wife about the meaning of the song, getting somewhat silly about the imagery and symbolism the lyrics evoke. There is a definite Becket, Waiting for Godot element to this sequence.

The film also deals with the bizarre Kafka-esque elements of the bureaucratic Romanian police force and legal system. After intensely following the schoolkid around, Cristi goes to his office to write his report. Rather than have him read the report or have a character discuss the contents, we see the handwritten page onscreen and read it ourselves. It is an exhaustive listing of what we have just seen, and underlines the stupidity of his assignment. Seeing the report directly is an absolutely elegant touch that fits in perfectly with the tone of the film and brings us in even more intimately than we already are.

We then get two separate characters commenting on a small, inane spelling mistake in the report. There is a sense that even being as careful and detailed as he can be with minutiae, Cristi can never combat the vulcanized bureaucracy that pervades his culture. These moments are rather funny in their craziness and hopelessness - but it is clear that it is depressing to live amidst it. This discomfort is beautifully shown onscreen with the never-ending beige-gray interiors and graffiti-covered walls of the exterior around town. Everything is sad and overused and falling apart in this world.

Dragos Bucur plays Cristi beautifully as a smart cop who wants to fight back against the impossible system he finds himself in, but knows there's not much he can do about it. He is dejected as he comes to terms with his 'object-ness'. As the title suggests, he becomes less of a noun and more of an adjective. He's not a policeman, but a modifier of another thing. A 'police story', a 'police man'.

This is a totally magnificent, difficult film. It is one of the most thought-provoking works of 2009 and certainly among the best films of the year.

Stars: 4 of 4