Tag: Romanian cinema

Men of Deeds (Oameni de Treaba)

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM SARAJEVO

Being the only policeman in a small village in Northern Romania shouldn’t be that hard. There might be the odd six families that do all the stealing, but for the most part all you really have to do is run errands for the mayor and not get into trouble. So Ilie – played by popular Romanian comedian Iulian Postelnicu – tells a new recruit (Anghel Damian) fresh from the academy. Ilie really doesn’t care about the job. What he really wants is an orchard. But the question is how much is he willing to compromise in order to get it?

Paul Neghoescu’s feature is a blackly comic satire on politics as it’s played out at the local and potentially most corrupt level. There is an obvious beauty to the countryside, though the village has recently been hit by floods, and one can understand Ilie’s longing for a little piece of land and something to look on with joy. The locals are a mix of free roaming chickens, mouth-breathing thugs and headscarved hardworking women and the powerful leaders of the community comprised of the avuncular major Constantin (Vasile Muraru) and his brother (Daniel Busuioc) a lumbering potentially psychopathic priest.

And Ilie himself is an ‘anything for a quiet life’ type. A brutal murder disrupts the delicate balance, but even so Ilie does his best to keep the peace with the added incentive of an orchard the mayor might be willing to give him cheap. The academy fresh rookie has other ideas though and risks upsetting the balance. As the violence begins to escalate, including the intimidation of the victim’s widow (Cristina Semciuc) who Ilie has an unrequited crush on, the hapless policeman must work out which side he truly wants to stand on.

Postelnicu is superb and the film at times seems to exist more as a vehicle for his obvious talents rather than an independent entity in and of itself. His policeman is a slacker who seems to have found something like the quiet life. He goes along to get along and has very little that’s admirable about him, but quite a lot which is likable. His thin frame and the deadpan face which always seems stuck between incomprehension and a grimace gives him a Keatonesque melancholy. As the film progresses however the tone shifts notably into something much darker and the last act slides into bloody farce. Whether the film has anything deeper to say about corruption and how winking at small misdeeds leads to ever deeper swamps of corruption is open to question. But there are comedies where even the cries of pain can become very funny – and no less real for that.

Men of Deed premiered at the 25th Sarajevo Film Festival, whichs is being held from August 12th to the 19th.

Ana, mon Amour

Posted on by victorfraga

Ana (Diana Cavallioti) is a university girl to whom most people would find it difficult to relate. She suffers from depression, anxiety, panic attacks and she’s prone to all sorts of emotional outbursts. To most, she would be simply “annoying”. Her family background is deeply dysfunctional, and there are clues to suggest that she was molested by her stepfather as a teenager. She is unable to voice with the origin of the woes, and she struggles with the various types of medication she has to take. Yet her fellow student and boyfriend Toma (Mircea Postelnicu) is extremely patient, comprehensive and supportive of the extremely unstable and vulnerable young woman.

This might sound like the perfect plot for a languid and dire movie, or an unabashed tearjerker. Yet Ana, mon Amour has enough vigour, candour and pronfundity to make for a very convincing and compelling 127-minute viewing experience. The movie shuns a traditional chronology in favour a very irregular zigzag. Ana and Toma move back and forth in time from the early days when they met to their marriage, children all the way to separation. At time you won’t be able to determine when the action is taking place, and that’s ok. There’s no build-up towards an epic revelation at the end of the movie, and the dramatic strength of the movie lies instead in the subtles twists of fate and gradual changes of personality, supported by very strong performances.

Tamo will constantly seek answers to Ana’s mental health problems, but he will often fail to find them. Audiences will embark on a similar quest, being able to join some dots, but not all of them. Tamo will slowly begin to experience uncertainties of his very own, and he too will turn to others for support: first a priest then a psychoanalyst. The jolly, generous, affable and emotionally balanced young man will begin to morph into something else, and so will Ana. Those who identified themselves with the highly likable male character in the beginning of the film have a surprise in store waiting for them, as he too falls prey to his fallibility.

The anatomic realism of Ana, mon Amour is certain to be misinterpreted. Prudes will cringe dismiss some of the scenes as “unnecessary”. There’s real sex and ejaculation, a bloodied vagina following an unidentified medical episode, plus Toma applying cream to his son’s penis. These sequences are never exploitative, in fact they are rather fast and banal, even tender in their simplicity. They are still enough to unsettle Brits uncomfortable with anything too close to the bone.

Ana, mon Amour showed at the 67th Berlin Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. Forty-one-year-old Călin Peter Netzer won the award just four years ago with the film Child’s Pose. It is showing at the BFI London Film Festival.