Festivals And Seasons

7th Romanian Film Festival
2 July – 7 July

by David Parkinson

A little smaller than in previous years, but still packed with intriguing titles, the Romanian Film Festival returns to London for a seventh year. In addition to Calin Peter Netzer’s ironic revisionist memoir, Medal of Honour, and Florin Serban’s delinquency drama, If I Want to, I Whistle, the programme also includes several shorts: Tudor Cristian Jurgiu’s Oli’s Wedding; Alexandru Mavrodineanu’s Music in the Blood; Adrian Sitaru’s The Cage; and Klara Trencsenyi and Vlad Naumescu’s Birds’ Way.

There is also a rare chance to see one of the classics of 1980s Romanian cinema, Dan Pita’s Sand Cliffs (1983), which charts the efforts of a neurotic surgeon to have an innocent carpenter jailed for the theft of a radio. Prompting President Nicolae Ceausescu to launch into an intemperate speech at a conference, the film was banned on its release for its scathing denunciation of the Communist regime and its ruthless methods. And the extent to which old habits die hard is explored in the festival’s standout picture, Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective.

Having won the Caméra d’or at Cannes for 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), his hilariously revisionist take on the 1989 Romanian revolution, Porumboiu surpasses himself with this chilling insight into the extent to which things have really changed since the coming of democracy. Tackling such complex issues as language, the law and the long reach of history, this is also a stylistically ambitious picture that compellingly combines long stretches of mundane activity with taut sequences of intricate verbal dexterity.

Dragos Bucur is an undercover cop in the north-eastern city of Vaslui, who has been detailed by inspector Ion Stoica to shadow teenager Radu Costin, who is suspected of being a drug dealer. Following him from his apartment in a drab tenement, Bucur watches Costin sneak away with classmates Alexandru Sabadac and Anca Diaconu for a crafty smoke on some wasteland near a toddlers’ playground. He also spends hours lurking outside Sabadac’s family home, noting the comings and goings of his parents and the disappearance of an older brother, who is probably responsible for smuggling the dope into the country. Yet, even though he has collected a couple of joints, Bucur is far from convinced that Costin is a danger to society.

When he’s not on stakeout duty or setting slowly turning bureaucratic wheels in motion back at headquarters, Bucur is bickering with new wife Irina Saulescu, either over her repeated playing of a corny pop song on her laptop or the imprecise use of grammar. Ironically, it’s a linguistic matter that proves Bucur’s downfall, as he is subjected to a grilling by martinet captain Vlad Ivanov, who makes him look up the words he uses so casually in his report to demonstrate the rigidity of the Romanian legal system.

Photographed in long realist takes by Marius Panduru, this is a darkly satirical, yet insidiously disconcerting study of routine and rubric. Moreover, it’s an acute dissection of a society trapped between its totalitarian past and a pan-European future. Bucur is unwilling to prosecute Costin, as he will receive a life-ruining sentence for something that would merely be deemed a minor misdemeanour under incoming EU legislation. But, having spent days scrupulously avoiding his superiors, his humiliation by Ivanov suggests that not everyone is yet prepared to relinquish trusted methods.

Exposing the absurdity of much detective work and the growing inability to communicate in the new media age, this is a deceptively trenchant film that ends the drolly interminable scenes of surveillance and beadledom with a resounding thump, as the iron fist of authoritarianism crushes any notions of personal initiative.

For more information: www.romanianculturalcentre.org.uk/filmfestival/