Wonderful “It was in 1965, I believe – the first time I was out of Romania , seeing the West. It was an official trip. ‘A nightmare with shades of revelling in which Rolls-Royces drove me from a banquet to another, as if in a Technicolor Kafka'. I was accompanying Sunday at Six, and the film was also on its virgin voyage to the West. An official screening had been scheduled. How many people will be in the projection hall? I was asking myself. A Romanian film is a hard trial, and I was betting against myself: 100 people at least, that's not bad at all, 100 people is good. There were 8 people there and I still remember them. I was seated in the first row, Letitia, Clody's sister, who was living in Brighton, Ioana, Gogu Georgescu's daughter, Ghibernea from the Embassy, the interpreter, some two people with water glasses who vanished some time during the film, and nobody from the Romanian delegation because they had, from someone in Romania , the address of a shop with cheap knickers.

Everything was, nevertheless, compensated by the extraordinary presence of a gentleman who seemed to be a fiction, as he was the archetypal Englishman to a surreal extent. He was made after the ‘Old Colonel in the Indian Army' cast. He had come out directly of Kipling's pages. ‘He's a former soldier in the First World War – a war film maker – he even filmed Ribbentrop in 1938, he's an ancient pensioner, employed for several years as a representative of UK Film Council – an official relic – an expression of the English racial purity of the 19th Century', the interpreter whispers with a smile, ‘he has plenty of humour and is a dedicated drinker of Welsh whisky'.

The screening has begun. Only now do I dare to turn my head slowly towards him so I can see him. Such a splendid profile. How many hundreds of years in the making of this profile? In less than 10 seconds he falls asleep. Not a single move from his profile during the entirety of the film. Not one single opening of his eyes. As if he knows the film by heart and he's watching it in his head. He has, evidently, a thorough expertise in this area. I am sure he is used as the face of the relationship with other similar world cinemas (Bulgarian, Tajikistani, Turkish, North-Korean etc). The film is over. He still keeps his eyes closed for 2 or 3 seconds. He opens his eyes, gets up, and he is exactly as tall as was calculated (planned?) for him to be. He says - looking me straight in the eye: Wonderful.

Then he gives me his hand, his head nods towards me abruptly, with a rapid jerk, shakes my hand as if I were an old adversary in battle whom he admires. And he says it again: Wonderful.

On 11 November 2001 , that is almost 40 years after this event, I was at home in Paris , watching the TV, in a slumber that was mixing the images on the screen with those from my dreams. I was hearing some nice military music in my dream. I opened my eyes a little. It was the Arc de Triomphe. The wind was blowing and it made the cloaks covering some skeletons wave. Jacques Chirac was passing amidst the skeletons, and two people were raising them from behind. Jacques Chirac gave them decorations. Then, the bones were seated back in a disorderly fashion. A short biographical note accompanied the skeletons' ballet.

They were ‘les anciens combatants de la premiere guerre mondiale' / ‘the veteran fighters from the First World War'. It is indecent, as my bad habits urge me to do, to prolong the ‘tension'. Naturally, he, my archetypal Englishman, was there – and not much changed – Chirac was decorating him and he thanked him with the same curt nod I knew from the time he thanked me for a film he only saw for 6 seconds.

‘So, what did we learn from this all?'.

‘We have learned that my Englishman was born in the 19th Century, was filming during First World War, had filmed Ribbentrop and had also seen Sunday at Six in the next century, he'd said Wonderful then he'd curiously stepped into the third Millennium. Ain't that cool?'

‘Wonderful'.”

(Lucian Pintilie, ‘Bricabrac', Humanitas, Bucharest , 2003)

“A good few good years ago, I was invited to come to London ; not in the sublime conditions of an anaemic bursary, but in the atrocious conditions created by official treatment. There is no other period of my life which bears such an imprint of the unreal, of the nightmare with traces of revelry, as that, fortunately, short time when Rolls-Royces took me from a banquet to another, as in a Technicolor Kafka.

Undoubtedly, the epitome of this delirium of honours was the moment when the Archbishop of Canterbury himself graced us, amidst the ruins of the gothic cathedral of Coventry, with a lengthy conversation, a grace that was due, of course, to the fact that our group of film people had been mistaken for a government mission, whose visit in Coventry took place – by a strange coincidence – at the same time as ours, the lesser folk.

I will always preserve a pleasant memory of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, although he was told in the meantime by some underling – using a certain delicate cipher – about the vaudeville error in which he was sinking, continued after several blinks of the eyes to converse with us magnanimously, as if nothing was wrong; the high prelate probably knew that there is such thing as perseverance even in error.”

(Lucian Pintilie, ‘Bricabrac', Humanitas, Bucharest , 2003)