Quod erat demonstrandum (2013)

Andrei Gruzsniczki is a new name for me. Quod erat demonstrandum is a restrained story about how political repression affects personal relations. It's the mid 1980's, Romania. Two academics struggle with their relation to the regime and the secret police. The film takes a deep look at the compromises and the fears elicited by a repressive police state. Shot in B&W and using a pared-down palette of settings, Quad erad demonstrandum mostly focuses on the close surroundings of the characters: dinners, job situations, blackouts. The main character, Sorin, is a mathematician who resists the normal procedures. Another colleague, Elena, is planning to join her husband abroad. She works with computers and it is clear that the secret police is poking their nose into her life. The third main character, Alecu, is an investigator from the secret police. The merit of the film is the care it takes to portray the implications of a system for personal relations. It delineates a logic of conquer and divide, a logic of paranoia and disloyalty. One could say that a major theme is how the system is held up and promoted by these emotions.

Child's Pose (2012)

If you've been following Romanian cinema during the last few years you know that there are several directors working with realism in a way that feels fresh and compelling. Child's Pose (dir. Calin Peter Netzer) offers a chilly glimpse into the life of the ridiculously rich; the film discloses a country deeply marked by class differences, and it also shows a certain group of rich people so indulged by their easy lifestyle that they are alienated from reality - they can bribe their way into any project they take on, even when these projects comprise human relationships. Netzer's take on family drama is a dark and raw one, focusing on how affection intermingles with manipulation and blackmailing. A mother desperately tries to help and assist her son, who is to blame for a car crash in which one person was killed. The relation between the mother and the son is a catastrophe, and throughout the film, the mother tries to reach out to her son, but this hardly comes out as the pure love of a mother. Corruption abounds, on several different levels (social and personal). What I like about Netzer's approach is that the film rarely gets preachy or indignant, even though the portrait of the upper class contains many satirical moments (some of which relates to the characters' attempts to appear culturally sophisticated or as "being in the same boat as everybody else"). At the same time as this is a film about class, it's also a film about grief, a subject the director takes just as seriously, even though he tackles it with his own peculiar clinical cinematic style (all shots, even when they are busy, bear the feel of a penetrating glance).

I also want to mention Luminita Gheorghiu's performance - she acts the role of the mother, and I can't recall when I've seen such a complex display of iciness and emotionality; Gheorghiu really lets us take a stand on what we would regard as a matter of emotional bribery and what is to be considered as a spontaneous reaction.

Beyond the Hills (2012)

Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was a  rollercoaster of a film: it gripped me by the guts and didn't let go. His latest film, Beyond the Hills, may not be as direct and strong. It is also more complex, and mostly I think this complexity deepens the film. That said, Beyond the Hill is a challenging movie, one which I do not regret having seen. Clearly, Mungiu is a director that has things to say. Here, he explores a story in which religious frenzy, a non-existent welfare state and a sad love story are complicit factors in the film's evolving tragedy - no easy solutions wait around the corner and there is no comforting consolation that everything will be alright in the end. Mungiu's approach is harsh and it remains harsh, but that doesn't mean he is cynical.

Alina comes back from Germany to go visit her friend/lover Voichita who lives in a small monastery. They both grew up in the same orphanage. Alina has resolved to take Voichita with her away from the monastery, so that they could live together. Voichita oscillates between different solutions and as the story progresses, they both live in the monastery. Alina is seen as an outsider, a threat to the order. That is also what she becomes. One horrible thing after another happens, not as a result of one action, or one person's malice. Things get out of hand, and Alina gets desperate. And desperation is also the theme here, and people's responses to it. Voichita pleads for her friend: they must take care of her in the monastery, they must let her stay and they must help her, because nobody else will, they cannot throw her out on the street. In this way, the film connects several aspects of a situation that goes from bad to worse. Mungiu looks at how decisions and attitudes evolve within a bigger context, a context of insecurity and vulnerability. I don't think the film bashes religion itself. Rather, the monastery is placed in a specific society, a specific state of poverty and social problems. It seems quite true to the film to emphasize its character of tragedy: Mungiu takes a step back and looks at the big picture, how a truly sad chain of events unfolds from a messy background story involving many levels of lack of support but also attempts to help and understand.   

Mungius combines wide-angle shots of the grim landscape surrounding the convent with the much more crammed images of urban life - and in a similar way, the film shifts from silence to the piercing noise of the city. His steady attention works just as well when he focuses on the ordinary life of the nuns as when he takes his characters to the labyrinthine hospital. Nothing is romanticized, there are no spaces of relief. This makes the film quite exhausting, and I must admit that in some scenes towards the end we see more than we should see and not just the life of the characters but also this viewer's capacity to digest the harsh violence on display starts to deteriorate. I no longer know what to think about what is going on: would I really call all this a matter of good-hearted yet clueless attempts to 'help'? Well - - -. My thoughts start to poke around in darkness. But on the other hand, the very last scenes are terribly well crafted and powerful. I would say that what makes Beyond the Hills a good film is that instead of accusing, it poses a series of important questions about the meaning of responsibility and the different ways we are weighed down by a requirement to act.

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (2007)

During the last few years, quite a few Romanian film makers have received some deserved attention. 4 weeks, 3 months and 2 days is the only film I've seen by Cristian Mungiu. It is, indeed, a good film, a film that grabs your attention and you're hardly breathing during those two hours. Mungiu made a film that doesn't compromise. It's a harsh story and the way it is told is just as hard. There are no props that will sugarcoat those gruesome images. Sometimes, hints of bleak humor can be traced, but that is quite rare. One of the things I like about this film is how unselfconscious it is. It tries nothing. No tricks, nothing.

The story is set in a wintry Romanian city during the late 80's. A college girl, Gabita, is intent on having an abortion. There is no legal way to do it. Her friend Otilia helps her. Otilia meets the grim-looking abortionist. She takes him to a hotel. There is bargain / a gruesome event. Otilia has agreed to meet her fussy boyfriend's familia...

Mungiu pays close attention to surroundings. The story, which spans no more than ten hours, transports the viewer from a drab college dorm to wintry city backstreets to a drab hotel and to the upper-middle class home of well-to-do family. What makes Mungiu such a damn fine director is that he doesn't clutter the scenes with needless "markers" guiling us into the mental sphere of "Ceausescu's Romania". In other words: Mungiu focuses on what is important. That doesn't mean that the story is a very straightforward one. In one sense it is: we follow a few eventful hours experienced by a college student who does what she can to mend off catastrophies. In another sense, "what is important" has very little to do with "progression of a narrative". For example, we see an endless bullshit discussion between folks who like to brag about themselves. In the centre of the frames: Otilia's pale, impatient face. For perhaps 1/2 hour we watch how painful waiting can be. I am not sure if I have ever seen that kind of anxious impatience portrayed so ferociously on film before.

This is just one example of how 4 weeks excel in evoking emotions and the way emotions express an understanding of a situation. But, what is most important of all, Mungiu doesn't overstate the case. The treatment of the subject is always subtle, always exploratory.

The death of mister Lazarescu (2005)

I've been looking forward to watching The death of mister Lazarescu (2005) for a long time. Now that I've seen it, I am satisfied to say that it lived up to all my expectations. Even though the story is depressing as hell the film represents a raw kind of dark comedy. The film takes off with images of mister Lazarescu, an elderly, lonely man who lives with his cats. He downs some drinks and calls the ambulance to tell them he is sick and needs to get to the hospital. He receives some help from his neighbors (who reproach him for letting his cats pee in the stairwell) and then, finally, an ambulance arrives. But the events that follow bring little hope for mister Lazarescu. He is shuttled from hospital to hospital, rejected on various grounds, there is no place for him, he fails to conform to the doctor's legalistic definition of what it means to go into surgery "voluntarily". This is a brutal film about bureaucracy, depersonalization and institutionalization. For most characters in the film - not all - Lazarescu is just another drunk the treatment of whom society cannot afford. When the ambulance personnel bring him to yet another hospital, he is met with the standard question: "You have been drinking?" And, later on: "This man has peed his pants?" What makes this film so great is that it is sober (no pun intended). It's a film about society and work. But this is not a lecture in sociology. Puiu's characters are not built like representatives of their societal role & function (that might be justified in some films, I'd say, but Puiu's film takes another path).
Puiu has made a film that is good in several ways. Even though there are not many obvious experiments to be found here in terms of cinematography etc., the style of sometimes wobbly hand-held camera fits its style. Puiu follows mister Lazarescu's journey in and out of consciousness, dismissals, how he is sometimes tended to, how night turns into morning, with an admirable palette of perspectives and atmospheres. There is no big statement about humanity being either this way or that way. It's a film where cynicism is described as cynicism and, even more interestingly, where those doctors and nurses who are not cynical are NOT depicted as heroic, quasi-celestial beings. It's a down-to-earth film that is evident both in its treatment of cruelty and goodness. This might be a quite rare thing, actually - because goodness tends to be transformed into either naivety or some inexplicable spurt of altruistic action.

The ending of the movie, which I won't spoil, is a moment of sheer brilliance. As is the rest of the film.

12:08 East of Bucharest (2006)

The last 40 minutes of 12:08 East of Bucharest are among the funniest and most painful moments on film I've seen in some time. Two men and the anchorman, Jdrescu, sit in a row in a drab TV studio. Just the way they sit, uncomfortably rubbing elbows, has a deeply comical streak. The program is supposed to look into the question of whether their home town did have a revolution - or not. Was there any uprising on the main piazza before 12:08 1989 (the moment Ceausescu flew off in an helicopter)? Or did everyone see the fall of Ceausescu on TV, heading out to express their opinions only afterwards? The TV show becomes an excruciating catastrophy, starting with the anchorman's totally nonsensical blabbering about Plato's cave and Heraclitus. A world-weary teacher who is known as a drinker seems to be making up stories about his own heroic past - but that is up to you to decide. His friend, who we know as the guy who dresses up as Santa Claus for children - mutters inaudible things to himself, fiddling with a piece of paper (but who, later on, delivers a moving account of the particular day of interest). People call the show to announce that the teacher is a damned liar. There was no revolution, they say, the square was empty.

Porumboiu's film represents a full-blown type of movie-making. He pays attention to everything, it seems. Colors, sounds - and, most striking of all, the angle of the frames. Most of the scenes put the viewer in a weird place. Either we look at the protagonists from a doorway, through a windshield or we see them from far away. And then I haven't yet mentioned the intentionally clumsy shooting during the last 40 minutes. Brilliant. These effects are employed ingeniously.

What becomes evident in the film is at least that "was there ever a revolution?" signals that there is no agreement as to the kind of change brought about by the end of the Ceausescu regime (who are to count as political revolutionaries, who just sort of tagged along with the flow) - what did it mean for different parts of the country, for different people, groups of society? The film makes the point in several ways but never in a tiresome way. It's very well made, and has depth both in terms of content and style.

Plus: the closing scene is absolutely stunning. Stunning!