New Wave on the Black Sea
By A. O. SCOTT
January 20, 2008“HAVE YOU SEEN THE ROMANIAN MOVIE?” This somewhat improbable question began to circulate around the midpoint of the 2005
Cannes Film Festival. For some reason, the critics, journalists and film-industry hangers-on who gather in Cannes each May to gossip and graze rarely refer to the films they see there by their titles, preferring a shorthand of auteur, genre or country of origin (“the Gus Van Sant”; “the Chinese documentary”; “that Russian thing”). It’s a code that everyone is assumed to know, and in this case there was not much room for confusion. How many Romanian movies could there be?
More than most of us would have predicted as it turned out. But for the moment we were happy to have "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," the second feature by Cristi Puiu, though given the movie’s methods and subject matter there was perhaps something a little perverse in our joy. Its exotic provenance was not the only thing that made Puiu’s movie sound like something only a stereotypical film snob could love. More than two and a half hours long, “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” chronicles the last night in the life of its title character, a flabby 63-year-old Bucharest pensioner with a stomachache and a drinking problem. Filmed in a quasi-documentary style in drab urban locations — a shabby apartment, the inside of an ambulance, a series of fluorescent-bulbed hospital waiting and examination rooms — it follows a narrative arc from morbidity to mortality punctuated by casual, appalling instances of medical malpractice.
And yet viewers who witnessed poor Dante Lazarescu’s unheroic passing on the grand screen of the Salle Debussy emerged from the experience feeling more exhilarated than depressed. “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” is raw, melancholy and unflinching, but it is also lyrical, funny and, perhaps paradoxically, full of life. And though the wobbling camera and the use of unflattering available light create an atmosphere of tough, unadorned naturalism, the film is also, on closer inspection, a remarkably artful piece of work, with a strong, unpredictable story, rigorous camera work and powerfully understated performances. The excitement that greeted it came from the feeling that one of the oldest and strongest capacities of cinema — to capture and illuminate reality, one face, one room, one life at a time — had been renewed.
When the festival was over, Cristi Puiu returned to Bucharest with an award, called Un Certain Regard, given to the best film in a side program that frequently upstages the main competition. The rest of us went home with the glow of discovery that is one reason we go to film festivals in the first place. This is not an especially unusual occurrence on the festival circuit. Every so often, a modest picture from an obscure place makes a big splash in the relatively small international art-film pond. But the triumph of “Mr. Lazarescu” in Cannes turned out to be a sign of things to come. In 2006, the year after “Mr. Lazarescu,” attentive Cannes adventurers would find room in their screening schedules for two new Romanian movies, Catalin Mitulescu’s “Way I Spent the End of the World” and Corneliu Porumboiu’s "12:08 East of Bucharest," both of which dealt, albeit in very different ways, with the revolution of 1989. When the time came to hand out awards, Porumboiu won the Caméra d’Or, given to the best debut feature.
A year later, the first film in the Cannes competition to be shown to the press was Cristian Mungiu’s second feature, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," a harrowing, suspenseful story of illegal abortion and an unsparing portrait of daily life in the last years of Communist rule. By the end of the festival, “the Romanian abortion movie” (its inevitable and somewhat unfortunate shorthand designation) had overpowered a competitive field. There was much delight but no great surprise when Mungiu, a soft-spoken, round-faced 39-year-old, walked onto the stage of the Salle Lumière on the last night of the festival to accept the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize and a token of membership in the world fraternity of cinematic masters (or at least in a diverse club whose other recent inductees include Roman Polanski, Lars von Trier and Michael Moore). Earlier in the day, the Certain Regard jury (one of whose members was Cristi Puiu) gave its award to "California Dreamin'," yet another Romanian movie whose director, the prodigiously talented Cristian Nemescu, died in a car accident the year before at the age of 27.
In three years, then, four major prizes at the world’s pre-eminent film festival went to movies from a country whose place in the history of 20th-century cinema might charitably be called marginal. The post-Cannes triumphal march of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (it opens in New York on Friday) to the tops of English-language critics’ polls and year-end lists, as well as to a Golden Globe nomination, offers belated confirmation of last spring’s news flash from the Côte d’Azur. But perhaps you are hearing it here first: the Romanian new wave has arrived.
IS THERE OR IS THERE NOT?
Such is the consensus, or at least the hype, within the worldwide critical community. In Romania itself, where Mungiu’s Palme d’Or was front-page news and occasioned a burst of national pride (including a medal bestowed on the director by the country’s president), there is a bit more skepticism. The Romanian title of “12:08 East of Bucharest,” the 2006 Caméra d’Or winner, is “Fost sau n-a fost,” which translates as “was there or was there not?” The question is posed by the pompous host of a provincial television talk show to an undistinguished panel (consisting of an alcoholic schoolteacher, a semiretired Santa Claus and a desultory handful of callers) on the 16th anniversary of the revolution that overthrew Nicolae Ceausescu. The moderator wants his guests to address whether or not, in their sad little city in Moldavia (Porumboiu’s hometown of Vaslui), the revolution really happened. A long and inconclusive debate follows, punctuated by verbal digressions and technical difficulties: a production assistant’s hand reaches into the frame; the camera abruptly zooms in on the host’s nose. (“At last, a close-up,” he says). A discussion of contemporary Romanian cinema with Romanian filmmakers and critics can sometimes resemble that scene: “Is there or is there not a Romanian new wave?” Or, as it was put recently, with some irreverence, before a very distinguished panel at a contentious public debate held at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, “Romanian Cinema: The Golden Age?”
Compared with what? Romanian cinema, it will be pointed out, was not born with “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.” As it happened, Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or arrived punctually on the 50th anniversary of the first Romanian Palme, awarded in 1957 to Ion Popescu-Gopo’s “Short History,” a charming, wordless animated short in which human evolution and industrial development culminate in the planting of large daisylike flowers on distant planets. More to the point, there was a Romanian movie industry in the 1970s and ’80s, and many of the filmmakers whose movies traveled the festival rounds in those days — directors like Stere Gulea, Dan Pita and Mircea Daneliuc — are still active. The younger generation, furthermore, does not necessarily represent a unified or coherent movement.
In an article published last summer in the English-language journal European Alternatives, Alex Leo Serban, one of Romania’s leading film critics, instructed readers to keep in mind that “there are no ‘waves,’ . . . just individuals.” When I met him in Bucharest in November, Puiu, the director of “Mr. Lazarescu,” was more emphatic. “There is not, not, not, not, not a Romanian new wave,” he insisted, hammering the point home against the arm of his living-room couch. Puiu, who studied painting in Switzerland before turning to film, is given to grand, counterintuitive statements. (“I am not a filmmaker!” he practically shouted at me when I asked him, in all innocence, what inspired him to become one.) To spend time with him — as I discovered in the course of a long evening at his apartment, during which several bottles of Romanian wine and countless American cigarettes joined Mr. Lazarescu in the great beyond — is to be drawn into frequent and fascinating argument. Over hors d’oeuvres, we stumbled into a friendly quarrel over the idea that anyone’s life has ever really been changed by a book or a film, and as we ate roast lamb at Puiu’s high, narrow kitchen table we debated whether or not a camera’s zoom could be said to correspond to any activity of the human eye.
When it comes to new waves, the critics who announce (or invent) them have more of an investment than artists, who understandably resist the notion that their individuality might be assimilated into some larger tendency. Ever since the French Nouvelle Vague of the late 1950s and early ’60s, cinephiles have scanned the horizon looking for movement. In Czechoslovakia before 1968, in West Germany and Hollywood in the 1970s and more recently in Taiwan, Iran and Uzbekistan, the metaphor signaled newness, iconoclasm, a casting off of tradition and a rediscovery of latent possibilities. It also contains an implicit threat of obsolescence, since what crests and crashes ashore is also sure to ebb. Which may be one reason for partisans of Romanian cinema to resist the idea of a wave. If no one wins a prize next year in Cannes, will this golden age be over?
But it’s hard, all the same, for an outsider to give full credence to the notion that the current flowering of Romanian film is entirely a matter of happenstance, the serendipitous convergence of a bunch of idiosyncratic talents. For one thing, to watch recent Romanian movies — the features and the shorts, the festival prizewinners and those that might or should have been — is to discover a good deal of continuity and overlap in addition to obvious differences.
Though they might be reluctant to admit it, the new Romanian filmmakers have a lot in common beyond their reliance on a small pool of acting and technical talent. Because of the stylistic elements they share — a penchant for long takes and fixed camera positions; a taste for plain lighting and everyday décor; a preference for stories set amid ordinary life — Puiu, Porumboiu and Mungiu are sometimes described as minimalists or neo-neorealists. But while their work does show some affinity with that of other contemporary European auteurs, like the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who make art out of the grim facts of quotidian existence, the realism of the Romanians has some distinct characteristics of its own.
It seems like something more than coincidence, for example, that the five features that might constitute a mini-canon of 21st-century Romanian cinema — “Stuff and Dough,” Puiu’s first feature; “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”; “12:08 East of Bucharest”; “The Paper Will Be Blue,” by Radu Muntean; and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” — all confine their action to a single day and focus on a single action. This is less a matter of Aristotelian discipline than of respect for the contingency and loose-endedness of real experience. In each case, the action is completed — Lazarescu dies; the abortion in “4 Months” is performed; the broadcast in “12:08” comes to an end — but a lingering, haunting sense of inconclusiveness remains. The narratives have a shape, but they seem less like plots abstracted from life than like segments carved out of its rough rhythms. The characters are often in a state of restless, agitated motion, confused about where they are going and what they will find when they arrive. The camera follows them into ambulances, streetcars, armored vehicles and minivans, communicating with unsettling immediacy their anxiety and disorientation. The viewer is denied the luxury of distance. After a while, you feel you are living inside these movies as much as watching them.
When Otilia, the heroine of “4 Months,” joins a dinner party at her boyfriend’s house, the camera stays across the table from her, putting the audience in the position of a silent, watchful guest. We know she has just been through an unspeakably strange and awful experience, but the others, friends of the boyfriend’s parents, are oblivious, and their banal, posturing wisdom becomes excruciating. The emptiness of authority — whether generational, political or conferred by elevated social status — is an unmistakable theme in the work of nearly all the younger Romanian filmmakers. The doctors who neglect Mr. Lazarescu; the grandiose, small-time television host in “12:08”; the swaggering army commanders and rebel leaders in “The Paper Will Be Blue” and their successors, the officious bureaucrats in “California Dreamin’ ” — all of these men (and they are all men) display a self-importance that is both absurd and malignant. Their hold on power is mitigated sometimes by their own clumsiness but more often by unheralded, stubborn acts of ordinary decency. An ambulance technician decides to help out a suffering old man who is neither kin nor especially kind; a student stands stoically by her irresponsible friend; a militia officer, in the middle of a revolution, goes out of his way to find and protect an errant, idealistic young man under his command.
There is almost no didacticism or point-making in these films, none of whose characters are easily sorted into good guys and bad guys. Instead, there is an almost palpable impulse to tell the truth, to present choices, conflicts and accidents without exaggeration or omission. This is a form of realism, of course, but its motivation seems to be as much ethical as aesthetic, less a matter of verisimilitude than of honesty. There is an unmistakable political dimension to this kind of storytelling, even when the stories themselves seem to have no overt political content. During the Ceausescu era, which ended abruptly, violently and somewhat ambiguously in December 1989 — in the last and least velvety of the revolutions of that year — Romanian public life was dominated by fantasies, delusions and lies. And the filmmakers who were able to work in such conditions resorted, like artists in other communist countries, to various forms of allegory and indirection. Both Puiu and Mungiu describe this earlier mode of Romanian cinema as “metaphorical,” and both utter the word with a heavy inflection of disgust.
“I wanted to become a filmmaker as a reaction to that kind of cinema,” Mungiu told me. “Nothing like this ever happened in real life. And you got this desire to say: ‘People, you don’t know what you’re talking about. This is all fake. This is not what you should be telling in films. I could do way better than you.’ I felt this way, but I think this whole generation had that feeling. Those movies were badly acted, completely unbelievable, with stupid situations, lots of metaphors. It was a time when, you know, saying something about the system was more important than telling a story.”
The new generation finds itself with no shortage of stories to tell, whether about the traumas of the Stalinist past or the confusions of the Euro-consumerist present — and also, for the moment, with an audience eager to hear them.
TALES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE
Or perhaps with several different audiences. “Make sure you pay attention to the words on the screen at the beginning,” Mungiu advised a packed house of moviegoers who had come, six months after Cannes, to see “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” This was in Silver Spring, Md., at a program of new European movies presented by the American Film Institute. I saw Mungiu in Cannes in May and met him briefly at the New York Film Festival, but as it happened I would be unable to catch him in Bucharest. After his triumphant homecoming and a kind of roadshow Romanian release of “4 Months” over the summer, he had been in a state of frequent-flier exile familiar to successful filmmakers, crisscrossing the globe — with stops in Korea, Berlin, Los Angeles and now the suburbs of Washington — to show his movie.
His opening remarks were meant to direct the audience’s attention to the only part of “4 Months” that provides its story with explicit context, a note in the lower right-hand corner that says, “Romania, 1987.” But for this crowd, it turned out, the explanation was redundant. They knew exactly where they were. Two-thirds of the way through the screening — at a point when the viewer is fully immersed in the helplessness and dread that are the film’s governing emotions — I bumped into Mungiu just outside the theater doors. He appeared to be listening intently to what was going on inside. “I think there are a lot of Romanians here tonight,” he said, looking up. I asked what gave him that impression. “They’re laughing,” he said. “They always do.”
Now, it should be noted that “4 Months” is about as far from a comedy as a movie can be. If you were looking for a generic label, you could do worse than to call it a kind of horror movie, in which the two main characters, young women in jeopardy, are subjected to the sadism of an unscrupulous abortionist and, almost worse, the indifference, hostility and incomprehension of just about everyone else. It is not an easy film to watch, but it feels, to a non-Romanian, like an absolutely convincing anatomy of what ordinary people endured under communism. And it clearly felt that way to the members of the Romanian diaspora as well, except that they found humor in addition to horror in revisiting a familiar bygone world. What followed the screening was less the anticipated Q-and-A session than a trip down memory lane, which spilled out into the theater lobby and continued well into the night. “That was exactly like my dorm room at university,” one woman announced. Another wanted to know how Mungiu found the brands of soap, gum and other items that had been staples of the Ceausescu era. (“You can find anything on the Internet,” he replied.)
Mungiu originally conceived “4 Months,” which is based on something that happened to a woman he knows, as part of a series of “Tales From the Golden Age,” an ironic reference to the way Ceausescu characterized his reign, which began in 1965. Born in 1968, Mungiu calls himself a “child of the decree,” meaning Ceausescu’s 1966 edict restricting abortion and birth control for the purpose of spurring economic development by increasing the Romanian population. Though the law fell short of its demographic goals, it did in its way spawn a handful of new Romanian filmmakers, who reached adolescence and early adulthood just as Ceausescu’s monstrous utopian experiment was collapsing. Puiu was born in 1967. Muntean, whose experience in the military during the 1989 revolution is the basis of “The Paper Will Be Blue,” is four years younger. Corneliu Porumboiu was 14 (and playing table tennis with a friend) when the old regime fell.
Its demise was an anomaly, much as the regime itself was. One especially painful aspect of Romanian communism was that it was, well, Romanian — an indigenous outgrowth at least as much as a foreign imposition. For much of his reign, Ceausescu was admired in the West for his relative independence from Moscow, but internally he fostered a nationalist cult of personality that in some ways had more in common with Kim Il Sung’s North Korea (which Ceausescu came to admire after visiting in the early 1970s) than with desultory bureaucratic police states like Czechoslovakia and East Germany. And perhaps for this reason — because Romanians were not simply throwing off an imperial yoke, but at the same time exorcising a leader who claimed to be the highest incarnation of their identity as a people — the Romanian revolution was by far the most violent in Eastern Europe in 1989. Elsewhere, the imagery of that year consists of hammers chipping at the Berlin Wall and a playwright installed in Prague Castle, but in Romania there are soldiers firing into crowds, torn flags and the summary execution, on Christmas Day, of the dictator and his wife. And the nature of the event is shadowed, to this day, by doubt and irresolution. Was it a popular uprising or a coup d’etat sponsored by an opportunistic faction within the military and the ruling party? Its aftermath — in particular the violent suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in June 1990 — was nearly as bloody as the revolution itself, and the transition out of communism in the 1990s was marked by economic crisis, political stalemate and social malaise.
It would be an unwarranted generalization for me to claim that Romanians are still preoccupied with this history. I can say, though, that every conversation I had in Bucharest, even the most casual, circled back to the old days, so that I sometimes felt that they ended much more recently than 18 years ago. And the physical aspect of Bucharest confirms this impression. The busy shopping streets have the usual storefronts — Sephora, Hugo Boss, various cellphone carriers and European grocery chains — and the main north-south road out of town is jammed with Land Rovers and lined with big-box discount stores. Turn a corner, though, or glance behind one of the billboards mounted on the walls of old buildings, and you are thrown backward, from the shiny new age of the European Union (which Romania joined only last year) into the rustiest days of the Iron Curtain. The architecture is a jumble of late-19th-century Hapsburg-style villas and gray socialist apartment blocks, some showing signs of renovation, others looking as if they had fallen under the protection of some mad Warsaw Pact preservation society.
This layering of the old and the new was perhaps most apparent when I visited Bucharest’s National University of Drama and Film (U.N.A.T.C.), a venerable institution housed in a building rumored to have been previously used as a training facility for the Securitate, Ceausescu’s notorious secret police. Mungiu, Porumboiu and Nemescu are all U.N.A.T.C. graduates, and Puiu currently teaches courses there in screen acting. Like much else in the city, the complex was under renovation, with freshly painted walls and tools banging and buzzing in the corridors and courtyards. In a drafty classroom downstairs, I was introduced to members of the faculty, who sat silently and warily, arms folded, as, with the help of an interpreter, I fumbled through an explanation of my interest in new Romanian film. It was not an interest any of them gave much indication of sharing, apart from one voluble professor. “We are all dinosaurs, but at least I will admit that I am one,” he announced, before going on to praise the achievements of his former students.
Afterward, feeling as if I had just failed an oral exam, I went upstairs to meet with some current students — about 40 of them, crowded into a small screening room. The difference between them and their professors seemed to be more than just a matter of age and status. They belonged to a different world, one in which I felt perfectly at home. I wanted to talk about Romanian cinema, and while they had a lot to say about the subject, they also wanted to talk about Borat and David Lynch, about Sundance and the Oscars, about Japanese anime and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”
Fost sau n-a fost? You tell me.
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’
“There is no Romanian film industry.” This is not another one of Cristi Puiu’s counterintuitive provocations but rather a statement I was to hear again and again in Bucharest as I visited the offices of film schools and production companies, a studio back lot and the headquarters of the National Center for Cinematography (C.N.C.). There was no shortage of industriousness, but Romania lacks the basic infrastructure that makes the cycle of production, distribution and exhibition viable in other countries. What is missing, above all, is movie theaters: there are around 80 cinemas serving a country of 22 million people, and 7 of the 42 largest municipalities have no movie screens at all. (In the United States there are almost 40,000 screens and millions of movie fans who still complain that there is nothing to see).
What Romania does have, in addition to a backlog of stories crying out to be told on screen, are traditions and institutions that give filmmakers at least some of the tools required to tell them. The “dinosaurs” at U.N.A.T.C. take their pupils through a rigorous program of instruction that includes courses in aesthetics and art history and requires them to make two 35-millimeter short films before graduating, one of them in black and white. This kind of old-school technical training, which extends to acting as well, surely accounts for some of the sophistication and self-assurance that Mungiu, Porumboiu and their colleagues display.
Not that anything comes easily. The shortage of screens means that the potential for domestic commercial returns is small, and therefore it is hard to attract substantial private investment, either from within Romania or from outside the country. And the scarcity of theaters makes exhibition quotas — which other countries use to protect their film industries from being overwhelmed by Hollywood — untenable. But if there is no film industry, there is at least a Law of Cinematography (modeled on a French statute) that establishes a mechanism by which the state helps finance movie production. Taxes collected on television advertising revenue, DVD sales and other media-related transactions go into a fund, money from which is distributed in a twice-yearly competition. Winning projects are ranked, with the top selections receiving as much as 50 percent of their production costs from the fund. Film costs tend to be modest — the budget of “4 Months” was around 700,000 euros — and the filmmakers have 10 years to pay back the state’s investment, at which point they own the film outright.
Many of the filmmakers I spoke to complained about the system. Porumboiu, impatient with its slow pace and bureaucratic obstacles, financed “12:08” himself. Shortly before Cannes last year, Mungiu was involved in a public spat with the C.N.C. that made headlines in the local press. After a dispute with the center, Puiu circulated a letter pledging never to participate in the system again.
But a collection of the movies that arose from harmonious relations between filmmakers and their financiers would consist largely of home videos and vanity projects. Even frustrated artists, in other words, can flourish. And their success abroad, moreover, feeds the system with prestige and helps bring in money from the European Union and adventurous foreign investors.
Though Romania’s homegrown film industry will most likely remain small, it exists in close proximity to Hollywood itself. American audiences may not be familiar with “The Paper Will Be Blue” or “Stuff and Dough,” but those who have seen “Cold Mountain,” “Borat” or “Seed of Chucky” can claim some acquaintance with Romanian cinema, or at least with movies made in Romania. About 20 miles outside of Bucharest, where newly built suburban developments give way to farmland, is the Castel Film Studio, a vast complex that houses the largest soundstage in Europe, a 200,000-gallon tank for underwater filming and standing sets like city streets, a full-size wingless jet and the mountain hamlet from “Cold Mountain.”
Castel promises skilled labor at a lower cost than producers are likely to find in the United States or Western Europe (though the weakness of the dollar has made its prices a bit less attractive to Americans). Its crews are trained at the rigorous Romanian film schools, and in turn receive hands-on experience with equipment that is hard to come by in modest Romanian productions. Oleg Mutu, the director of photography who brought Bucharest to gloomy life in “Mr. Lazarescu” and “4 Months,” spent a few weeks operating a camera on “Cold Mountain.” Cristi Puiu recently shot an insurance commercial at Castel. The U.N.A.T.C. students, even as they dream of Golden Palms and envision making tough, realistic movies about immigrants, Gypsies and alienated youth, acknowledge that they are more likely to find paying work in advertising or television.
Meanwhile, the stars of the current wave — who are part of what is to my mind the most exciting development in a European national cinema since Spain in the 1980s — contemplate their next projects and prepare their proposals for the next round of C.N.C. competitions. One afternoon in Bucharest, Corneliu Porumboiu and I sat in the cafe at the Bucharest Cinematheque, drinking coffee and talking about movies: Woody Allen; “The Lives of Others”; the Italian neorealists. The Cinematheque is a kind of mothership for Bucharest cineastes. It’s where they went to discover exotic films when they were younger, and where their films are now shown and celebrated in a country without many other public places for movie going.
After a while, we got up, and Porumboiu offered to show me around the screening rooms. At the box-office entrance, decorated with a “4 Months, 3 Weeks and Two Days” flier, a guard confronted us and shooed us away. The facilities were closed. Porumboiu tried to explain that he wanted to show them to a guest from New York, but he was rebuffed. We could buy a ticket or rent out a theater, but we couldn’t just walk in and look around. And so we wandered away, to find another place to hang out in this bustling, bedraggled city. It occurred to me that maybe there was no Romanian translation of the sentence “Do you know who I am?” — which would have been the first thing out of an American director’s mouth in a similar situation. Or perhaps this was a double-edged metaphor: maybe in Bucharest, nowadays, a filmmaker with a prize from Cannes is nothing special.
