by ·Comments Off on The Second Game (2014, Corneliu Porumboiu)

The one where the director watches a scoreless soccer game on TV with his dad, a soccer game his dad coached, and they discuss the game, players, era, and political context… difference in rules and tactics between then (1988) and now, the political implications of this army-vs-police game and the risks of being its referee. It’s movie-as-audio-commentary, and I was on board for the first half, until it runs out of interest and energy, just like most audio commenataries. Dad complains about the picture quality (“it’s from the stone age”) and he also takes a phone call which causes digital interference in the sound recording, so both layers have their tech problems.

Jordan Cronk in Cinema Scope: “It quickly becomes clear that the least interesting thing occurring on screen is the game. Rather, interpersonal rivalries, intimidation tactics, convenient editing, and extracurricular ploys provide the drama in a parallel conflict taking place just beneath the surface.”

Dad: “You couldn’t make a film out of this. Nobody would watch it, it’s all in the past. Football is like everything else, like cinema and art: they all have their moment, you consume it, and it’s over.”

Porumboiu, arguing that the game is like his films:

by ·Comments Off on Police, Adjective (2009, Corneliu Porumboiu)

Depressing movie about policing within a corrupt system. Slow-burn investigation by officer Cristi culminates in a half-hour meeting with his boss (star of The Whistlers), who insists that he either arrest a bunch of kids for drug violations or quit the force, pulling out a dictionary and being as pedantic as [__ ___ ____].

by ·Comments Off on The Klezmer Project (2023, Koch & Schachmann)

Listened to Cracow Klezmer Band at work, had a Czech lager, watched a klezmer movie – good day. Wedding videographer Leandro likes musician Paloma, fakes that he’s making a klezmer documentary to get her interest, then follows through, traveling from Argentina to Austria to Ukraine to Romania to Moldavia, chasing music that no longer exists in its origin lands (we hear plenty of performances but are told that technically they’re not klezmer, ha). It’s a true-falsey travelogue through folk tales and tunes, adding up to nothing much narratively but quite a lot cinematically.

Victor Covaci, Romania:

Morris Yang:

The Klezmer Project also incorporates a third, folkloric narrative in Yiddish voiceover, centered around Yankel, a gravedigger’s assistant, and Taibele, a rabbi’s daughter, as they face excommunication from their community over support for the heretical philosophy of Baruch Spinoza … The Klezmer Project meticulously subverts its structural expectations in service of a hybridized docu-fiction register, working best both as ethnomusicology and as meditation on its intrinsically whimsical and rewarding process.

by ·Comments Off on The Treasure (2015, Corneliu Porumboiu)

I was expecting pointless dreary toil – but remember, this is The Whistlers guy, not the Lazarescu guy or the Beyond the Hills guy – so they really do find treasure. Family man Costi is asked by neighbor Adrian who he barely knows if he’ll fund the neighbor’s treasure hunt in his family backyard. They hire a metal detector operator off the books and spend an entire day searching and digging. After they hit a metal box buried deep, the operator leaves and presumably calls the cops on them, but the Mercedes stock certificates within are grudgingly determined not to be of Romanian historical value and the men get to keep them. They’re millionaires, but Costi’s son is disappointed that the box just contained boring paper, so dad goes to a fancy jewelry store and buys enough pearls and gold to create a real treasure chest then lets the kids drag it all over the playground. Droll movie, and the end credits are somehow the best part as the camera swings up to the sun and blasts a Laibach song. Family man was also in Aferim! and Întregalde.

Began as a doc, but Porumboiu was disappointed that they didn’t find anything, so he kept the real setup and location, wrote a new ending, cast Adrian and the doc’s metal detector operator as themselves:

I was looking at the footage we shot and I had this strange feeling that we were lost in that garden, that it became this dark hole. In the beginning, the documentary was quite funny because Corneliu really screwed around with the machines and didn’t really know how they worked, so we were laughing – but after that, step by step, it grew sadder … [then in the fictional version] I wanted to have this sense of absurdity in the history. The characters speak about two revolutions, in the 1800s and the 1900s. I think Romania’s past is very fragmented. So they find something German … completely outside of their conception of the history of that place.

by ·Comments Off on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023, Radu Jude)

I didn’t love Jude’s pandemic movie, but I’m extremely onboard with this one – everything down to the closing credits is delightful. It’s a very cynical movie about Romania and capitalism, starring Radu-regular Ilinca Manolache as Angela, an odd-jobs film-shoot worker.

Angela’s present-day is filmed in grainy b/w, her filtered selfie videos doing misogynist insult commentary are in low-detail digital color, then there’s another Angela who also drives a car for a living, via the 1982 film Angela Goes On, in beautifully restored 35mm color. That movie is the Poor Cow to the main feature’s The Limey, and its Angela appears in present day (the same actress/character) as the mom of a disabled worker hired to tell his story for a company safety video.

Radu Jude in Cinema Scope:

When I was young and reading all these stories about Herzog shooting Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Coppola shooting Apocalypse Now, it sounded so heroic. In the early days, when we were supposed to work 20 hours and then drive to another location, it felt magical and sort of heroic. I don’t see it quite that way anymore. You can fool yourself into thinking this way as a filmmaker, but for the people working around you, it’s not like that at all. They don’t care if your movie is going to win an Oscar, or if it’s going to be a piece of crap. They just want to finish the shooting and go home.

Translation issues:

From the mid-film wordless montage of roadside death markers:

Mark Asch in Little White Lies:

Angela’s set of wheels signify anything but independence: she’s cut off, honked at, catcalled, and constantly slamming brakes, swearing, and flipping off other drivers. HQ keeps her on a leash (her ringtone, signaling the arrival of yet another task, is Beethoven’s 9th, the official anthem of the EU), appealing to her team spirit — and, implicitly, her economic precarity as a project-based worker — as they send her over to the airport to pick up a foreign guest, or to pick up lenses from a backlot where Uwe Boll is shooting a cheap nonunion monster movie.

Cemetery advertising:

Jude again:

I think the film is also a film about Bucharest. Why does Bucharest look so bad today compared to how it looked back then? Some of that is propaganda, as many images and films from that time were produced to show the most beautiful side of Bucharest, which is why I slow down those less beautiful moments from Angela Moves On — so you can see the other side. But even still, Bucharest is in much worse shape now, 30 years after the revolution. How did we let that happen? It’s more crowded now, more polluted—cars are on the sidewalk, buildings are falling down, etc. I read that it’s the second most congested city in the world. I think the film can show this by putting one image next to another, and in doing so maybe propose this question to the viewer.

by ·Comments Off on Beyond the Hills (2012, Cristian Mungiu)

Not trying to join the Stereogum Anniversary Culture, but I happened to watch this on the tenth anniversary of its premiere. This is bound to happen at least once during Cannes Week. Rounding out my viewing of Mungiu’s major features right before his brand-new one debuted, this one’s a prime example of a movie good enough to transcend its dreary subject matter (insular religious cultures; see also Silent Light).

Much of the appeal is in the character of Alina (Cristina Flutur of Backdraft 2, what?). She and Voichita (Cosmina Stratan of the Border guy’s surrogate pregnancy movie) were orphanage sisters, now separated, and Alina returns to visit then refuses to leave. She’s extremely needy, fearing abandonment, but also acts impossible so she can’t stay anywhere. Both the hospital and Voichita’s quiet monastery say they’re overcrowded during renovations, and anyway, Alina isn’t a believer. But she’s devoted to her friend, so the nuns read Alina a list of all 464 sins to see which she has committed, then when she’s violent they tie her down to drive out her evil spirits, but she’s also convulsive, and they leave her tied too long, and she dies. Seems like an openhearted, respectful take on a tragic story, made in the good ol’ master-shot long-take foreign-arthouse style.

by ·Comments Off on Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021, Radu Jude)

A key document of pandemic-era people being shitty to each other. Last week’s viewing of Happy Valley was well timed, since Jude also roams the streets here, filming construction and advertising billboards and plant life. Altogether too academic, despite all the sex. Chapter two is didactic social horrors. Mostly exasperating – give me Social Hygiene over this any day. At least this had better color than most movies – surprising, since it’s mostly a parent-teacher conference interrupted by documentary street scenes. My first by Radu Jude, whose previous six films have been on my radar.

by ·Comments Off on The Whistlers (2019, Corneliu Porumboiu)

Always a good call to open your movie with “The Passenger” by Iggy Pop. I lost track of the relationships and double-crosses, because I think all the cops are dirty and spying on each other… or rather, it’s not hard to follow while watching, but with the state of everything, I’ve lost track a month later. Story told in named chapters, out of order.

Our main dude is Cristi, with conspirator Gilda and boss Magda. The conspirators’ whistling language (and Cristi’s Old-Mark-Wahlberg look and performance) mostly serves to add notes of absurd humor, so this doesn’t turn into another grim tale of Romanian society/government corruption like Graduation.

Two dirty cops:

Sharp-looking and pleasurable, filled with guns, whistling, hidden cameras, vinyl records, movie theaters – after 12:08 and Metabolism and Infinite Football, I now have no idea what to expect from this guy.

by ·Comments Off on Collective (2019, Alexander Nanau)

Straightforward doc, named after the rock club that caught fire during a show, killing 20-some people (including most of the band), leading to massive public protests and a change of government. After 30-some more concertgoers died horribly from bacteria due to lack of care in local hospitals – a real-life Death of Mr. Lazarescu – Nanau followed the story through a reporter for a sports magazine, who does his own investigation, enraged by the corruption he uncovers: the hospitals all used disinfectants that had been diluted unto uselessness. The incoming health minister says he’ll operate with transparency, and he does, to the point of allowing the crew to follow him around. So we follow him for most of the second half of the film, also checking in regularly with a survivor of the fire, whose hands were badly injured. She does fashion shoots, gets robotic hands, and stays frustratingly apolitical. The post-film Q&A was interesting – this was early March, and parallels to more immediate government-botched health crises were becoming apparent. Opener Eli Fola played solo sax , but apparently there was a luggage snafu, he arrived sans equipment, and sax isn’t even his primary instrument… very good improv.