Given the recent triumph at Cannes of 4 luni, 3 săptămâni şi 2 zile [4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days] (2007) by Cristian Mungiu, the release of another Romanian film, last year’s Camera d’Or winner, is indeed an event worth waiting for. Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Its subtle, quiet pace is misleading, in as much as we are led to expect far less than what we are about to get hit by.

A gypsy clarinet tune announces a comedy of manners in the post-revolutionary style, which is very good at being cynical about modern Romania, but which fails to identify the causes for the initial economic failure of the transition. We are taken to a rather dull country town, just before Christmas 2005. Vaslui, a key city in Moldovan history, has become a still town, bored by its own Soviet-style architecture; a town in which the inhabitants pass from one day to the other without many expectations.

We meet Tiberiu Mănescu (Ion Sapdaru), a history teacher who is more in love with his bottle, than with his subject, or family. His debts are without end, and everyone smiles at him, but deep inside would prefer not to be bothered by him. Then there is Virgil Jderescu (Teodor Corban), who owns a local TV company, and is still trying to impress the town’s inhabitants with rather serious televised debates. All morning he is searching manically for local revolutionaries to join a panel and discuss, sixteen years on, whether the revolution happened or not in this quiet town. Unsurprisingly, everyone has better things to do, leaving him with two unremarkable speakers, Mănescu and Emanoil Pişcoci (Mircea Andreescu), an old pensioner who is more interested in acting as Santa Claus for a neighbour’s child than in discussing times he would rather forget.

The first half an hour is a remarkable feat of filmmaking. In a relative short period of time and by staging unrelated morning routine events about three unrelated characters, Porumboiu achieves an almost impossible cohesion of time, space and character. We sense that we know these characters inside out, we know that they take their wives for granted, get shouted at in return, and yet still manage to maintain their status as the man of the house. We know these minute characteristics because the director is careful to reveal their private selves using minimalist techniques. The holistic view ends up being an incremental construction, which we can take for granted without noticing.

More remarkable, however, is the second half of the film. Here Porumboiu tests his artistic testosterone and is confident that he can, for almost one hour, keep our attention fixed on a single scene in which three characters discuss on TV whether a group of revolutionaries were present on the streets of Vaslui on 22 December 1989, prior to 12:08pm (the time of Ceauşescu’s helicopter escape). If there were, then there was a revolution in town, if not, then the town ended up just following the herd, with its arms crossed, waiting for someone else to do the job. The director poses not a historical question, but an existential one. Like Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’, 12:08 East of Bucharest’s Romanian title asks ‘Was It or Wasn’t It?’. Through understanding the answer, Porumboiu hopes that the cynicism which dominated the 1990s will finally be explained, be it national cowardice, national ignorance, personal laziness, or pure loss of hope for change.

Corneliu Porumboiu is not a man who likes to talk about his work, nor should he. The film’s complexity, particularly during the television scene, speaks for itself. The comedy emerging from the pointlessness of Jderescu’s show on a local TV station, slowly transforms into a quest for essence, both for the main characters, as well as for the larger Romanian public. Misogyny, xenophobia, petty hatred towards the emerging bourgeoisie, political ignorance, and arrogance – all develop unnoticed and are never criticised by a community which thinks of itself as democratic, but still fails to put the idea into practice.

12:08 East of Bucharest is not a manifesto or a fervent critique. It is possibly closest to a travelogue through a society’s psychology. This is why we don’t mind the length of the TV show, and its apparent stillness. Porumboiu’s uniqueness lies primarily in the fact that the camera is not really a device to record moving images, but one designed for the observation of moving sensations. Mircea Andreescu’s final monologue, detailing Pişcoci’s story on the morning of 22 December 1989, is menacing in its power to affect us, rivalling the best of Tarkovsky, Bergman and Woody Allen. We, just like him, value the love of our partner more than of our country. Being a hero in the eyes of one’s beloved is arguably the best of gifts one can receive, reducing the weight of any medal to nothing.