Tag: Romanian

The Whistlers (La Gomera)

Posted on by victorfraga

Silbo Gomero is a whistled language used by the inhabitants of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, a community with no more than 20,000 inhabitants. It’s basically a transposition of Spanish from speech to whistling, but it can also be used with sounds from other languages. You stick a finger in your mouth, in a way very similar to wolf-whistling. It enables messages to be exchanged over a distance of up to five kilometres. The centuries-old language is extremely difficult to learn. The Whistlers doesn’t tell you any of this, but it’s useful to know just in case you decide to devout 97 minutes of your life to this film.

This Romanian crime thriller follows the footsteps of Romanian police officer Cristi (veteran actor Vlad Ivanov) as he arrives in La Gomera in order to infiltrate the mafia and recover €30 million concealed inside a mysterious mattress. He gains the trust of Gilda (Catrinel Marlon) and Kiko (Antonio Buil), who teach him the coded language (in Romanian) so that he can communicate efficiently with mobsters from a distance and without being caught. He miraculously learn it virtually overnight (which is very implausible, given the intricacy of the unusual language). Their objective is to release Zsolt (Sabin Tambrea) from prison back in Bucharest, as he’s the only person who knows where said mattress is hidden.

Cristi is overseen by police chief Magda (Rodica Lazar). She has installed surveillance cameras in his apartment so that her team can monitor his activities. She’s profoundly corrupt herself. After all, this is Romania. She’s prepared to plant drugs, to frame and and even poison those who stand on her way. She demands that Cristi engages in her unscrupulous practices, but he refuses. Cristi is the most morally ambiguous character, and for much of the film you will be trying to work out who his allegiance lies with (the corrupt police or the whistling criminals).

Romanian New Wave director Corneliu Porumboiu is best remembered for his more ruminative dramas, such as The Unsaved (2013) and Le Tresor (2015), yet this is not entirely new territory for him. He has previously directed Police, Adjective (2009), about a copper who refuses who to arrest a young man sharing drugs to his friends. The Whistlers, however, is far more violent and fast-faced than his previous films. It contains all the key ingredients of a crime thriller.

Unfortunately the film narrative is also a real mess. It moves back and forth between the Canary Islands and Spain, with a very bizarre ending in Singapore. It’s often difficult to work out exactly where the action is taking place. The action is roughly divided into chapters named after each one of the characters, yet these sections do not fit in together. In fact, I could only work out the film plot for this review after reading the synopsis. There are numerous twists and turns. Yet no reason and no rhyme. I simply couldn’t make head or tail of it.

The soundtrack is strangely hybrid. It opens up with Iggy Pop’s the Passenger as Cristi arrives on the island, moving on to Chavela Vargas, Maria Callas, classical music and even a quirky German song. I’m not sure how these tunes fit into the narrative. Their choice seems entirely random and idiosyncratic. This is a pretentious and incoherently-crafted piece of entertainment. Porumbuiu should have stuck to his more subtle and meditative dramas. Give it a miss.

The Whistlers showed in competition at the 72nd Cannes International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. On VoD on Friday, May 8th (2019). On Netflix from December (2020).

Scarred Hearts (Inimi Cicatrizate)

Posted on by victorfraga

Following the autobiographical writings of Max Blecher in his continual struggle with bone tuberculosis and constantly plagued by being bedridden, Scarred Hearts is Romanian director Radu Jude’s latest feature, dealing with a plethora of heavy and macabre themes in 1937’s Romania. Accompanied by a distinct visual style and gorgeous academy ratio, it’s a bold piece of European cinema that’s not afraid to patiently let a scene hold and play out, whilst slowly captivating you with its profound writings and opaque poetry.

After visiting a hospital with his father, 20-year-old Emanuel (Lucian Teodor Rus) is instantly submitted to long needles, a full back cast and regular operations to keep his tuberculosis at bay, while it slowly eats away at his back. Lacking any sort of establishing shot or location building, Emanuel – and audiences likewise – are instantly confined to the walls of hospital, accompanied by the vistas of the Black Sea. This period setting imbues the film with a sense of transition between two pivotal moments of modern human history, the two great wars. Just as Fascism and Hitler ate away at an ideologically weakened Europe, so does the tuberculosis to Emanuel’s back. In drawing away from setting its narrative during any conflict, Scarred Hearts channels Brady Corbet’s stunning debut Childhood of a Leader (2015) in choosing to explore a pre WW2 Europe – a film which deserves to be seen by more.

Bestowed with a youthful and fragile body, Teodor Rus’ physicality adds a layer of melancholy to the depiction of a youth being stricken down by an incurable illness, even if the doctors testify otherwise. Debuting for the first time, it’s a performance which is so tricky to capture. In the cinematography Marius Panduru, his bed bound action is caught from a side on perspective and rarely in any close shots, broadening the space which Emanuel and his bed hold in the frame. Rus’ performance is all the more impressive in his character’s constant state of institutionalised paralysis.

Adopting the period setting in the minutest detail, Christian Niclescu’s production design gives the hospital a strong conservative design. Filled with chequered tiles and baby-blue walls, as Emanuel’s health declines, so does the joy which fills these walls, from intellectual debates to sexual relation, resulting in a relationship, with himself and another part time patient Solange (Ivana Mladenovic). These former deeply intimate acts are captured in the words of M. Blecher which intercut the visuals. To some, this may be a hindrance on the narrative. Still, the voids of darkness which fill the white words in the centre of the screen elicit the emotions of Emanuel in a mature and delicate manner and hold the calming nature of poetry in Jim Jarmusch’s tantalising Paterson (2016).

Filled to the brim with themes such as what stimulates the intellectual, the mortality of man and the futility of illness, Scarred Hearts is a heavy, decadent sitting that brings despondency to the brain even after its final scene has played.

Scarred Hearts is available to view for free until Sunday, December 17th, as courtesy of the ArteKino Festival – just click here in order to accede directly to their website.

Graduation (Bacalaureat)

Posted on by victorfraga

The renowned Brazilian composer Caetano Veloso famously compared Brazil and Haiti in one of his songs. The song says “Haiti is here. Haiti is not here”, and then it describes an educational plan for the country that could miraculously extinguish corruption. This week internationally acclaimed director Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, 2007) returns with a universal study of corruption in Romania, also proposing a solution to the problem. It is as if he reinvented Veloso in a film: “Romania is here”.

Graduation reveals a father-daughter relationship in the moment when Eliza (Maria-Victoria Dragus) is about to graduate and to leave Romania in order to study in the UK. She still needs to do her finals and achieve a very high average so that she can get the scholarship and study abroad. The problem is that one day before her exams, she is raped on her way to school. Her father Romeo (Adrian Titieni), a physician living in a small town in Transylvania, will do everything he can in order to support his daughter overcome the trauma and succeed in her exams.

Mungiu believes that the only way to change society is through education. “But we are passing the wrong values to our children.” So how can society change? For him, “Romania needs a collective solution”. His character Romeo is trying to help his daughter to make the right choices than he couldn’t make. Romeo’s position is that “the UK is a more civilised society”. He doubts his daughter will suffer the same violence in Britain. Romeo’s mother, on the other hand, thinks her granddaughter should stay. There is only hope for a change if young people stay in Romania.

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The dialogue about living or leaving is developed throughout the 128 minutes of the film. In order to build a close and psychological portrait of each character, the filmmaker opts mostly for close and medium shots. There are very few wide shots, except in the end, when the film reveals the borders of Romania. The idea behind the story is that there is probably no exit.

The landscape is also very meaningful. The building where the family lives is in a suburban communal palace – a kind of Peckham Rye Council flat and widespread neighbourhood. The train line invades the property loft; there is not even a fence dividing the train tracks and the back of the palace. Romeo is following a person who threw a stone into his window and he stops suddenly 2 meters from the train tracks. He is nearly run over.

In a sense, the Graduation is a microcosm of Romanian society, where abuse, invasion and corruption know no bounds. The fact that Romeo almost never answers his mobile is another aspect of “invasion”. Presumably as a doctor, Romeo must get many calls in from patients. He doesn’t turn off the mobile. It is always vibrating. There is no exit and he cannot stop.

All actors are formidable, and Mungiu is a fine and confident director who deserved the Best Director Ex-Aequo award last year in Cannes. The prize was shared with Olivier Assayas, whose interview you can read here.

Cristian Mungiu will oversee the student and short film juries at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The Cinéfondation selects between 15 and 20 student films each year for its competition. You can read more about Cinéfondation in Cannes here. Rest assured that Mungiu will be an inspiring tutor!

Graduation was out in cinemas in March, and it has now been made available on DVD and Blu-ra.