London Romanian Film Festival 2007

Ion Martea
posted 3 May 2007

Romania only entered the European Union in 2007, but its film industry has been European for decades. Although it is tempting to dismiss its output as being only of regional interest, the recent wave of young Romanian directors shows that the country’s cinema is not a propaganda tool to dictate a national idea of prosperity (a role for which it was so often used during the Ceausescu regime), but rather a voice through which the heart of everyman can sing in its purest voice.

Coming in the wake of the international success of Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mister Lazarescu, the 2007 London Romanian Film Festival proved an enriching experience in the capital’s festival circuit. Although featuring no more than six feature films, the programme was far from modest. The striking feature of the selection though was that most of these were first time productions, making the festival’s title, Past Imperfect, Future Continuous, slightly prophetic. From Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, Radu Munteanu’s The Paper Will Be Blue to the closing gala with Catalin Mitulescu’s The Way I Spent the End of the World – all the films hinted stubbornly that Romanian cinema is here to stay, at least for a little while.

Two films did stand out though, both winners at Cannes last year. The opening gala film 12:08 East of Bucharest, to be released in the UK in September, and Mitulescu’s closing night feature. Both are set during the 1989 revolution and the fall of Ceausescu, but centre on characters who have nothing to do with these events, and yet these are two very different works. If the former is a more cynical, moody piece poisoned by a moving subtlety in its assessment of the past, The Way I Spent the End of the World is a poetic, humorous fairy-tale that doesn’t remember the past, but recreates it in style, like Fellini in Amarcord or Davies in Distant Voices, Still Lives.

Mitulescu’s film has a simple start. A 17-year-old Eva (Dorotheea Petre) finds herself enamoured with a classmate, Alexandru (Ionut Becheru). One day, sneaking for ten minutes out of class, Alexandru is so excited that Eva has agreed to make love to him that he breaks a bust of the president. Being the son of a trusted man of the Securitate (the Romanian Soviet secret service), he easily gets away with it. She, born in a family which sees the ruler as a great target for jokes, ends up being sent to a professional school (a euphemism for prison schools). There she meets a boy, Andrei (Cristian Vararu) who is planning to emigrate. Subsequently, she finds herself trapped between her new love and her parents’ insistence that she get back with Alexandru (just to ensure they have some degree of political protection). In the middle of this teenage drama, Eva’s 7-year-old brother, Lalalilu (Timotei Duma in a charming performance), is arguably the most courageous revolutionary of all.

A description of the plot however says little about this film. In The Way I Spent the End of the World, the stress is less on action, more on mood. The people are more afraid of their neighbours than of the system. Maybe they were right. Mitulescu refuses to offer a position on this.

Arguably, it is Dorotheea Petre’s Eva who is the key to understanding the film, rather than the scene-stealing Timotei Duma. It has become such a cliché to see young children as the answer to a history’s truth that it is rather refreshing to see a child portrayed as nothing more than what they should be: adventurous, free players, whose opinion never counts, and for whom everything is thus permitted. However, even Eva’s parents expect more ‘rationality’ from their daughter. She is really forced into a political life she doesn’t want. In refusing to fight (either for or against the regime) it is Eva who truly shows that enough is enough. For her, the revolution is ‘the end of the world’. She might move on, but she will never fit in, not deep in her heart, purely because she was taught that to fit in is to negate herself.

The last moments of The Way I Spent the End of the World are poignant in their refusal to sentimentalise, in their refusal to dictate one’s emotion, in their refusal to offer an escape from the illusion of victory. The trap is in the way history is seen predominantly as a continuous string of closed events, a neverending list of conclusive moments. What Mitulescu seems to question is the very essence of that, arguing instead for an escape out of a state of lamenting about the past, thus encouraging a view of history as beginnings.

The fact that the three main features at the festival were focused on the Romanian revolution in 1989 shows that people still want to understand the past, and even the young directors don’t find the construction of the future a worthy project, not even in artistic terms. Looking beyond the storylines however, all these films show that all this discussion is worthless by now. What really matters is understanding the country’s future through learning about individuals’ concepts of life. The Romanian new wave gives voice to those individuals.