anul nou care n-a fost / the new year that never came. (w&d bogdan mureșanu)

I imagine if the viewer was more cognisant of the events leading to Ceausescu’s, Mureșanu’s film it might have felt less surprising. We are in Rumania, 1989. The film carefully lays its groundwork as we get to know five different characters whose lives only overlap tangentially. One is an actress, another a  TV director, his son who is a student, a woman in a house due to be demolished and the worker who comes to help her move. Over the course of two hours their stories will criss and cross, as each one struggles with the harsh realities of a socialist state riven with informers and fear. The Securitate lurk at every turn. When the worker finds out that his son has written to Father Christmas with not just his own wishes but wishes for his parents, and that the absurd wish he has made and written down for his dad could potentially lead to him ending up in prison, we get a glimpse into the terrifying comic absurdity of life under Ceausescu.

The film has echoes of PTA’s Magnolia, with its telling use of song, and beautifully crafted script. However, allied to this, is it possesses a fierce political agenda, which leads to a devastating and emotional finale, where fiction and reality collide. Rumania has a great tradition of social realist filmmaking. Anul Nou Care N-A Fost belongs to this tradition, but the scope and ambition of the film adds another dimension. Not knowing where this was headed, the ending came as a truly moving surprise. Of course, had I been more clued in, as mentioned above, the surprise would not have been as powerful. But all the same, the way the director conjures the lives of these ordinary people, fleshing out their dreams and fears, is masterly as step by step the viewer becomes more and more immersed in the story. This is the opposite of filmmaking which seeks to grab the audience by the throat and drag them through the hedges. This is filmmaking as architecture, carefully laying the groundwork, putting down foundations, building brick by brick until the final mighty edifice is revealed. 

nostalgia (mircea cărtărescu, tr. julian semilian)

Cărtărescu’s fame has spiralled in recent years. The Twiterati are in a state of extreme excitement whenever his name crops up. Nostalgia is my first dive into his writing, and it’s clear that the author possesses what they always called back in my Writer’s Room days “a voice”. Nostalgia consists of five stories which are at most obliquely connected. The first deals with a Russian roulette player, who defies the odds. The last with an architect who creates the music of the spheres. Both these stories are breathlessly brilliant, in the way the writer’s imagination appears to stretch the boundaries, pushing the stories beyond any anticipated limits, in the process questioning the laws of probability and physics, respectively. These stories bookend three more which inhabit the middle of the book, and which this reader found heavier going. The intricacies of the writer’s mind at times seemed to overwhelm the scope of the story he was relating, or at least that was how it felt. The stories become ornately baroque and the quixotic Bucharest they occur in sometimes gets lost in the whorls and arpegios of the text. Or perhaps it was just the wrong week to be reading it. 

the hunger angel (herta müller, tr philip boehm)

This novel of Muller’s has a very different tone to the previous one of hers I read. It’s a fragmented, poetic read, beautifully translated by Philip Boehm, which narrates the experiences of Leopold, a Romanian of German descent (as is Muller), who is sent to a Soviet Labour camp with fellow Romanians of German descent after the second world war. As such it gives voice to another marginalised chapter from that teeming cauldron of 20th Century European history. Leopold is barely an adult when he’s exiled, obliged to pay compensation for the actions of others. Muller’s text, the helpful afterword explains, was shaped by her conversations with Oskar Pastior, a poet from her home village. She takes those memories and bends them into a cratered planet of language. In Leopold’s hunger driven consciousness, words sometimes seem more concrete than objects or actions. The landscape, the hardship and above all, the hunger, are minted in Muller’s words. It’s not a read that always flows readily, anymore than the life the exile experienced was one which was lived easily. There are moments of jagged beauty, moments of nonsense, and the banality of suffering, packed into short chapters that create a mosaic which presents Leopold’s years in the labour camp with, perhaps, far more authenticity than a more ‘realistic’ documentation of events would. 

la gomera (w&d corneliu porumboiu)

The Romanian new wave used to be a thing. Unorthodox, edgy cinema crafted by the post-Ceaucescu generation. Porumboiu along with Mungiu, Nemescu and others blazing a trail, instigating that rare occurrence of the flourishing of an urgent, national cinema. Where do these filmmakers head when the energy that drove that original wave has burnt out? In the case of Porumboiu’s La Gomera it turns out to be Singapore via the Canary Islands. Straightaway this betrays the fact that this is an international co-pro, with a budget to match. The opening of the film has the jaundiced cop, Cristi, arrive on the island of La Gomera to the backdrop of Iggy Pop’s Passenger. It’s a vigorous, confident opening, which is embellished by the charismatic Catrinel Marlon as femme fatale, Gilda. Cristi is soon being given lessons by the local gangsters in the Canary Island’s secret whistling language, which allows you to communicate via articulated whistles. This might have been a sly comment on contemporary communication practices, analogue versus digital, but the idea doesn’t really go anywhere, and neither does the film, which, for all its charm, is blighted by the curse of the comedy crime caper syndrome. Various criminals in Bucharest and La Gomera are pursued by various cops, most of them crooked. The comings and goings become less and less plausible and the energy of the opening is dissipated. It feels, with reference to the director’s earlier work, and the place he was coming from, as though the intellectual-social-political drive which fuelled his former cinema has been lost. Porumboiu is now a jobbing Euro-director. It’s not a bad job, someone’s got to do it, but the focus has gone, we’re now in strictly commercial territory, a place where the light no longer burns as bright. 

occident (w&d mungiu)

Mungiu’s first feature is a brilliant, flawed piece of filmmaking. Perhaps it’s easy to say in retrospect that there’s something callow about the film, given how it becomes clear in the director’s later career his capacity for conveying both emotion and tension. Nevertheless there’s a formal dexterity to Occident which wins the viewer over. The leap from Occident to 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days is fascinating. 4 Months possesses an intensity and tension which Occident barely hints at. Occident feels in many ways as though it belongs to a line of Eastern European filmmaking which celebrated the quirks of their respective societies, (think also of Kustirica’s early films and others such as Nemescu, Porumboiu or Menzel, even early Kieslowski.) The tone of much of this filmmaking is tongue-in-cheek, affectionate and ironic; also, clearly limited by what the censor permitted. 4 Months represented a step into a darker, more threatening world, with a level of psychological violence which grabbed the viewer by the throat. Having said which, Occident is a highly engaging piece of filmmaking in its own right. There’s a formal investigation of narrative, with three interwoven stories, reminiscent of its near contemporary Amores Perros. The fractured narrative is punctuated by freeze frames and the occasional crane shot, stylistic flourishes which the director dispensed with in his later films. The opening sequence runs the risk of becoming schmaltzy (notably through the use of music) but as the film builds layer upon layer, it lures the viewer in. In the end, Occident offers a diverse portrait of early C21st Bucharest, a city where Macdonalds and a ‘World Trade Centre’ commercial zone cohabit with rundown Ceausescu era apartment blocks. One where ordinary Romanians dream of escape to the West, whilst maintaining an affectionate, pre-atomised society which, his next film will go on to suggest, will soon be blown apart.

graduation (w&d christian mungiu)

There’s a rare pleasure to settling down to watch a film and realising that the guiding hand behind it knows exactly what they’re doing. You can sit back in your seat and trust that the narrative is going to engage, inform, give you a pay-off. 

Mungiu delivers exactly this in his latest film. It’s centred on a doctor, Romeo, who works in a small town, Cluj. Romeo doesn’t seem overly sympathetic at first. For a start he doesn’t look like most leading men. Rather, he looks like an ordinary middle-aged man. Overweight, specs, slightly hunched shoulders, careworn. We start off early knowing that he’s cheating on his wife and that he’s willing to bend the rules if he has to in order to ensure his daughter gets the grades she needs to study in the UK. It’s not a great starting position and Romeo has to earn the audience’s respect, gain our trust. Which, over the course of two hours, he does. The film probes and teases Romeo’s world, revealing how the small town he lives in functions, and the way in which these conditions shape a man or a woman’s morality. This is the other side of the social realism movie coin. Not the one that uses the lower classes as zoo fodder for the middle class cinema-going public, but one that carefully dissects the entirety of a community, pulling every loose string, slowly building a comprehensive portrayal of why the world it depicts functions like it does. 

Adrian Titen, as Romeo, present in almost every scene, delivers a masterful performance. Then again, so does every other actor. There’s not a single off-key note. As the story gradually plays itself out, we come to understand not only where every character fits into the world of the film, but also what their hopes, dreams and fears are. None of this ever becomes laboured. Meticulously, the film describes how Cluj functions, and why Romeo’s destiny has to be that which it is. (As such the film acts as an interesting corollary to Toni Erdmann). There’s nothing spectacular about Graduation, it doesn’t have the fireworks of the director’s most famous film, but it’s a storyteller’s film and constantly engaging. Sometimes telling a plain story is the hardest thing to do well. Mungiu does it with aplomb.

for two thousand years [mihail sebastian]

This is a love letter to the long-dead Romanian writer. In September 2001, a month that carried a historical weight which thankfully has yet to be emulated in this century, I picked up a copy of Sebastian’s diaries and began to read them. I have no idea where my copy came from. I finished the book on the first day of October. It is quite likely that it was as a direct result of reading his diary that I began to keep my own, something I maintained for four years. Diaries are one of the more curious literary formulations. They aren’t written to be read by anyone else. They accrue thousands and thousands of words. Imagine how long it would take to read all the unread diaries that have ever been written. The quantity of tedium, intimacy, incoherence, self-pity, social commentary. In a Borgesian world, every diary would find its reader. Mihail’s found me, in that moment. His voice, which was not a famous voice, spoke to me. Detailing the facets of his daily life as he struggled to cope with anti-semitism and fear of the war. But also whispering about the power of literature, the way it can make a voice leapfrog across the decades and the centuries, arriving unexpectedly to comfort you like a friend you never knew existed. 

That was fifteen years ago. Since then I have always carried Mihail Sebastian around with me in my memory and my heart. Of all the diaries I have ever read, his was the one that truly made me feel like I could have sat down for a drink with him. Laugh, speculate, opine, all those things. In a way that Kafka’s journals perhaps do not. Kafka being Sebastian’s contemporary and fellow Eastern-European Jew, sharing so many of the same concerns, the same hopes and fears. The pair with this new idea of a state of Israel lurking on the edge of their consciousness, a land which might be a promised land or might be a fable at the end of a rainbow, along with their shared history of Judaism, with its curses and its blessings. Kafka’s fame is exponential; in contrast I never came across another of Sebastian’s book’s in translation; in fact I never came across anyone who had read him or even heard of him. Mihail was a ghost, shadowing my thoughts, keeping watch.

Until I noticed that a book of his had been published this year by Penguin. For Two Thousand Years is a novel, written in a diary format. Over the course of several years it recounts the story of a Romanian Jew, an intellectual, who becomes an architect. The book is divided into six chapters, with each chapter occurring after a temporal break which is long enough to suggest that the writer has now moved on, as has the country he inhabits. The first book describes in mordant detail the abuse he and his fellow Jews receive at university. An abuse which is out in the open, which is treated as some kind of a game, even by Sebastian himself. A few years later, he is working as an architect in a rural part of the country. It appears as though the prejudice has blown over. He lives in Paris for a while, before returning. But the prejudice, which we would now call racism, never dissipates entirely. In the end even his closest colleagues reveal their anti-Semitism. There’s no escaping its insidious hold. 

It would be wrong to see this novel as being entirely about the issue of Sebastian’s Jewishness. It is also about friendship, about being Romanian, about love, about revolution. It provides shard-like insights into life in the late twenties and the early thirties. Within a Europe which had no idea of how close it was to catastrophe. I remember reading Sebastian’s diary, feeling as though I was living a parallel life, willing him to survive the war, to reach safety. Like Barthes, a fellow spirit, he was killed in a traffic accident. Of all the ways of dying that the 20th century had to offer him, this was the one fate chose. Reading the diary, it seems too cruel, although one can’t help feeling Sebastian himself might have enjoyed the irony. Having said that, Mihail lives on. True writers cannot be killed by trucks or bombs or cancer or any other formula fate throws at them. They shall continue to enchant, even when there remain no more eyes to read. How wonderful that this beautiful translation by Phillip O Ceallaigh has now appeared, opening up another window on one of the most elegant, measured voices of the twentieth century. 

the appointment [herta müller]

A woman gets on a tram to fulfil an appointment with her interrogator, Albu. Albu is a henchman of the Ceausescu regime. He’s brutish, possessed of a savage subtlety, and at the same time both marginal and central to the woman’s life. The narrative is threaded around this tram journey, which will take as long as the novel lasts. In between times, the narrator ducks in and out of her story, explaining how she came to be where she is, taking a tram to visit her interrogator. The fact that this journey seems almost voluntary makes it all the more chilling, because of course, it is not. There’s no escaping Albu. The fact that he permits you to go home after the interrogation ends doesn’t mean to say that it will ever end, that you are ever off the hook. The interrogations will continue for as long as the regime continues. This late 20th century Eastern European world is still resolutely Kafkaesque, after all these years. During the (tram) journey of the novel, the narrator describes her life to the reader. Her alcoholic boyfriend, Paul, her stark upbringing, the neighbours who spy on her and Paul, for one of whom she buys a notebook to assist him in his task. This is a down-at-heel, desolate Morrissey tune of a novel, only one where instead of ennui, the subject is gripped by a necessary and unavoidable paranoia. The noose is slowly closing in and there’s no escaping it. The trick, the narrator tells us, is not go to mad. Her acerbic observations and semi-transgressive friendship with the enigmatic and doomed Lilli help us to understand that she is, so far, succeeding in this aim, of not going mad, but it’s always there, the madness of despair, lurking round the corner, waiting to be thrown out of the window with the bedclothes and the pillows. Müller’s text is not an easy read, but then again, the life her heroine leads is not an easy life. 

katalin varga (w&d peter strickland)

A couple of girls giggle at Katalin when she asks them the way to the village in the hills. You don't want to go up there, they chortle. When she thanks them for showing her the way, they say, don't thank us, no-one wants to go there.

When Katalin gets to the village it turns out to be the sort of place Guardian readers (such as myself) imagine visiting for an eco-holiday. Transylvania is pretty, wooded, meadowed, just about beyond the boundaries of modern Europe. Accessible by car or horse and cart. You wouldn't want not to go there. Although made a few years ago, Katalin Varga is the second film released this year which suggests that there's something nasty in the woods waiting for us all. However, unlike Von Trier's pre-menstrual, pre-historic savagery, Varga's woods are pretty and enticing.

The film has been made on a shoe string and has been a breakout festival success. Whilst one takes one's hat off to the director for his achievement, and whilst his film has a self-contained, prosaic feel, miles from the Von Trier's extravagant dramatics, the narrative ends up feeling a little slight, and the denoument so understated it comes as a shock, though not a jolt. Whilst there's a concise folk-tale-ness to the ending, it was hard not to think that it disguised the lack of a third act. Also hard not to suspect that part of the reason for the film's success was the way in which it conveyed this seemingly pre-lapserian countryside, which turns out to be alluring rather than threatening to a European festival audience, no matter what it holds for Katalin herself.

california dreamin' (d. christian nemescu, w. nemescu & catherine linstrum)

There seems to have been a dearth of movies that demand to be seen in London this month. Perhaps I've missed some gems, perhaps it's just the start of a slack Summer season, or perhaps distributors are becoming ever more cautious and nothing that doesn't feature a ludicrous premise (in the case of British flicks) or a Hollywood star will ever be released again.

California Dreamin' features a Hollywood star, although not one who many producers would want to hang their coat on. Armand Assante's performance as the US military captain Doug Jones, whose company becomes stranded in a Roumanian village, hostage to the local honcho, is a peculiar one. He mumbles much of his dialogue, and whilst it seemed a little strange to see the US soldiers subtitled along with the Roumanian peasants, it did help to make sense of some of his more unlikely lines. Whether he was mouthing a strange translation from Roumanian into American-military speak, or just doing free-jazz improvisation, was impossible to tell. There was more than a hint of the Strangelove George C Scott to Assante's performance, all wild-eyed pent-up aggression with no outlet, but his oddness merely reflected an occasionally baffling movie.

The premise is straightforward and prepossessing. At the tail end of the Kosovan war a US communications team is effectively hijacked by Doiaru, the corrupt stationmaster, who has been waiting fifty years for the Americans to arrive. In a key speech, he says that he was expecting them to appear and get rid of the Nazis, then the Russians, then Ceausescu, and now when they do show up it's in order to go and bomb Serbs. The film makes play on the nature of Roumanian bureaucracy: nothing Jones barks into the telephone effects any change, and the company are stranded for four days. During which Doiaru's daughter, Monica, (the convincing Maria Dinulescu) has a fling with a fetching young US soldier; the company's discipline goes to pieces; and their presence finally provokes an insurrection against Doiaru which results in quasi-tragedy.

Nemescu splits the action up into four chapters, reflecting the four days the soldiers are stranded there. As a director his approach appeared to be to take the kitchen sink, throw it in, then see what else was lying around. Besides an inevitable Dracula-fest, which Assante sits through with a petulant/ comatose look on his face, there are various sub-plots involving Monica and the men who fancy her; an unexploded second world war bomb; the Roumanian government's attempts to displace Doiaru (played with an oxen belligerence by Razvan Vasilescu); a factory strike; and the remaining village politicking. The action is almost all rural, then all of a sudden Monica and her American soldier find themselves at a party in an unnamed town with a bomb going off beneath the bed. At one point the soldiers are taken to a replica of the Eiffel Tower, for no obvious reason save it makes for a pleasant frame. At another a Roumanian Elvis appears and sings Love Me Tender. It is a movie about the nature of being trapped and waiting, and at 155 minutes running time, it succeeds in conveying both the frustrations and delights of this experience.

In short, referring to a film which always prefers to go the long way round, it's a bit of a mess, containing about five movies in one. Its erratic structure is matched by its erratic tone - like a shapeless Kustirica movie, which is clearly going to be one of the baggier filmic structures you're likely to come across. And yet, California Dreamin' for all its longeurs, reminded me why I like movies and what I've been missing these past few weeks. It takes the viewer right into its peculiar world. The set-up of the clashing cultures was awkward (with some of the least soldierly US soldiers you're ever likely to see) but always fascinating, and the idea of having two people who cannot talk to one another but fancy the pants off each other was one of the more effective ideas in the pot-pourri. Nothing really hangs together, but all the same it's there, it's happening on the screen in front of you, and if you didn't see it you would have had no idea what it was you'd missed out on, for better or for worse.

That peculiar conflation of geography, economy, and a personal vision laid before your eyes in a dark room of a 'London' 'afternoon', (insert as appropriate), also known as cinema.

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (dir. Cristian Mungiu)

By 'eck it's grim up North. Or out East, in this instance. Mungiu's tale is one of austere miserabilsm, which clearly caught the consciences of the pampered Cannes jury, who awarded it the Palme D'Or.

This fact is stressed in the trailer, when a thespian voice declaims the film's Cannes victory. Mungiu is part of the new Romanian cinema boom. His film, which describes the circumstances of an abortion, is cleverly set in a world which almost seems like it might be contemporary, but is actually set in the last days of the Ceausescu tyranny. It's a world where everything is a hassle, and everyone's on the make. Trying to do something as simple as book a hotel room becomes a trial, with the hotel staff acting like they have a mandate from the Politburo to piss everyone off.

Mungiu establishes this world with a sharp eyed camera, which follows Otilia (played with a survivor's verve by Anamaria Marinca) as she goes about trying to help her friend Gaby, who is seeking the abortion. Otilia evades the bus conductors and deals with the hotel staff. She collects the creepy abortionist, Bebe, and does what needs to be done to ensure that the abortion goes ahead.

Bebe is a borderline psychopath, and Vlad Ivanov plays him with an understated menace. It's after he leaves that the film seems to lose direction, unsure whether it's in the genre of psychological horror, as the trailer suggests, or gritty social realism. It plumps more for the latter, with the discarded foetus lying on a bathroom floor acting as a visceral money shot. But even this image looks like it could belong to another genre. Mungiu has seeded various plot twists which are all red herrings - the knife; the missing ID papers etc. The audience's greatest fear is what will happen when Bebe returns, but Mungiu shies away from this as he explores Odilia's dark night of the soul on the streets of a relentlessly menacing but ultimately harmless Bucharest.

Mungiu's skill as a filmmaker is not in doubt. His ability to capture the nuances of social interaction is surgical, notably in the scenes between Odilia and her out-of-his-depth boyfriend. He lets the camera roll to generate a high level of tension in the Bebe scenes, and has no fear of inflicting merciless realism on his audience in the abortion scene. However, the red herrings, rather than adding to the story, in the end get in the way. Odilia's last line to the friend who's dragged her through a night of hell feels like a soft soap pay off. We've been taken to some bleak places, but nothing like as bleak as we'd feared.

Perhaps this is what the Cannes jury appreciated - Mungiu's ultimate good taste. In contrast to a film like Cargo 200, we come away from 4 Months... grateful that our society is supposedly more tender than this bleak vision of Bucharest, but hardly alienated by what we've seen. Mungiu's vision is harsh but never deranged. It represents a clinical, observational eye which mirrors the one we like to think we possess, when we stir ourselves enough to rise from the primordial soup of our materialist lives. The ultimate appeal of the film is the way it triggers our own better natures to engage with the screen, which leaves the cinema goer feeling enlightened by the misery, rather than disturbed by it. As such 4 Months... thrives on the strengths and ultimately succumbs to the weaknesses of social realism, a 'realism' all the more palatable for being set in a long-lost world of monstrous tyranny.

transylvania (dir tony gatlif)

How hard is to make a movie these days? In my mind, the dream film-making technique was Eric Rohmer's, who allegedly had a crew of about half a dozen for some of his precise fables. Cinema, the technologic medium, stripped down to its barest minimum; the bride stripped bare by her bachelors.

The cost of film always mitigated against cinema becoming as open a medium as say, music, poetry or art. But now the advent of HD is supposed to liberate the filmmaker. The expense of celluloid and making prints can be done away with, and with the latest hard disk technology, there aren't even any tapes. A film can, in theory, go straight from camera to edit suite.

+++

I don't know what Transylvania was shot on. But the screening was advertised as a digital screening, and the cinematography had the abrasive beauty of digital, rather than the subtler tones of celluloid.

Transylvania wears its rough and readiness on its sleeve, from the opening shots of a blurred car journey punctuated by quick fire stills of local peasants. It is in keeping with a digital ethos whereby all you need to do is ward off the evil eye, cast a beautiful woman or two, add more than a dash of local colour, and lay them on to the bare bones of a story. Done well enough and you have a movie.

This slightly cynical perspective crossed my mind as Asia Argento, playing the exotically named Zingarina, began her journey through Transylvania. The script felt half hearted, no more so than in her showdown with her no-good musical boyfriend, Milan. The director seemed more interested in capturing colour, as depicted in a visually impressive but narratively insignificant gypsy procession, than telling a story of any subtlelty. The impression that Zingarina and her friend were just spoilt Western show ponies lingered, and when Ms Argento claimed to have done 'everything' I was strongly inclined to disbelieve her. It seemed unlikely she'd ever made beans on toast, taught in a primary school, or sat around feeling shy at a party waiting for someone to talk to her. Although she had clearly smashed a lot of plates and presumably broken a few hearts.

It's only when the non-story line of her quest for the lost Romany ends, that the film begins to breathe. Nothing much happens. Zingarina hooks up with Tchangalo, the scraggy-haired modern day peddlar. They wander round Transylvania, getting into scrapes, being menaced by a bear, meeting old folk and not really going anywhere.

Transylvania, thankfully, turns into a shambling road movie. And in doing so, it reveals its origins. What Gatlif does, and clearly what he's seeking to do, is capture a world. This place called Transylvania. Which swallows Zingarina up (she becomes a gypsy) and the viewer with her.

And in the darkness of the communal space which exists between viewer and screen, I mused on a culture which seems as related to the Marsh Arabs as it does to Western Europe. Not a Kustarican fairy land, just a harsh, vibrant beauty which has been preserved as though in aspic by communist isolation and poverty. A land with much music, little advertising, its own codes, plenty of beer, wooden cellos, dodgy priests and the burning of coals.

These things have all been captured by Gatlif in Transylvania. If he'd had a big crew and a potage of trailers, it seems unlikely he'd have been able to preserve the aroma of authenticity which his camera somehow does. If his narrative had been more sophisticated and his points more precise, he might not have captured it either.

As it was I felt like I, along with Zingarina, had been taken to this place I'd never known before. And I envied Zingarina her escape from the confines of the spoilt Western world. And this envy is connected to the wish-fufilment of cinema, because, after all, it is but a fiction. Dreams made out of machines, made out of dreams.