The Romanians: The Earth’s Most Beloved Son

By and large, agents of the Securitate, Communist Romania’s secret police, had no sense of humor. Nobody understands this better than Victor Petrini. The philosophy professor will be sentenced to ten years in a political prison camp thanks to the deliberate and willful misinterpretation of a joke. His story was first told in Marin Preda’s novel, but it was withdrawn from circulation shortly after publication. Preda’s own death soon followed, stoking the suspicions of many. The release of the film adaptation was therefore quite a significant milestone, after the fall of Ceausescu. Serban Marinescu never sugar-coats any of the pain or humiliations of life under the Communist regime in The Earth’s Most Beloved Son, which screens as part of Film Forum’s The Romanians: 30 Years of Cinema Revolution.

For about ten seconds, Petrini has it all: a comfortable flat, the respect of his peers, and young trophy-ish wife. Then there comes a knock at the door—and poof, all gone. Naturally, his arrest involves violent manhandling, but the first interrogator takes a “good cop” approach. The surveillance apparatus intercepted a letter to Petrini from a colleague abroad and out of favor with the regime, which includes a reference to the catch-phrase from their old collegiate comedy act. Needless to say, the Securitate does not get it. Petrini refuses to confess and he has no names to name, so the interrogator’s superior unceremoniously condemns him to a gulag.

Survival there is a rough business. In fact, Marinescu depicts the realities of Socialist prison life in such a brutal, in-your-face manner, Beloved Son created a mini-firestorm of controversy in Romania when it was first released. Let’s just say Petrini’s experiences are akin to the roughest stuff in Oz and Sleepers, but he eventually fights back. The philosophy professor gets tough because he must be to survive, even after he is released.

Probably over half the film is dedicated to Petrini’s post-prison life. As a former political prisoner, he is at the mercy of hostile apparatchiks and plagued by venomous informers. His family and now ex-wife Matilda are definitely not there for him, but he will still try to find some grace in life.

Beloved Son would make an excellent pairing with Lucian Pintille’s The Oak. Both were produced in the early 1990s and present an emotionally devastating critique of the Communist system, but where The Oak is a hallucinatory Grand Guignol, Beloved is painfully grounded. Yet, it also has epic sweep, spanning decades of oppression.

The Romanians: The Way I Spent the End of the World

Lalalilu “Lali” Matei is only seven years-old, but he still figures out Ceausescu is an evil dictator and his socialist system is corrupt. Obviously, he is not a millennial. Despite the steady propaganda diet he receives at school, the young boy recognizes how much trouble the regime causes for his beloved older sister Eva. However, the year is 1989, so if they can just hold on long enough, life will eventually change (for the better) in Catalin Mitulescu’s The Way I Spent the End of the World (executive-produced by non-Romanians, Martin Scorsese and Wim Wenders), which screens as part of Film Forum’s current retrospective, The Romanians: 30 Years of Cinema Revolution.

After December 1989, breaking busts of Ceausescu would become a form of national therapy, but it could lead to no end of woe earlier in the year. Unfortunately, Eva and her boyfriend Alex accidentally do exactly that while sneaking off for a bit of necking during class. Vomica is protected by his father, a Party member-police officer, but that leaves Matei to take the fall. Much to Vomica’s surprise (and only his surprise), Matei dumps him soon after. He wants to pick up where they left off, but she will not forgive and forget the way he turned his back on her.

Of course, carrying on the relationship would be problematic after Matei is expelled from the Communist Youth academy. She must now attend the technical school, but there she meets Christian Vararu, the brooding son of a disgraced political prisoner. Meanwhile, little Lali picks up on all her stress, so he tries to organize his bratty friends into a gang that will take direct action against Ceausescu.

Admittedly, Lali and his pals can be a bit too cute, but there is something genuinely touching about his stormy but affectionate relationship with Eva. Even though the narrative is largely told through his eyes, there is no question Dorotheea Petre is the breakout star of TWISTEOTW. She develops richly complex chemistry with all her principle co-stars, whether it be young Lali, privileged Vomica, or morose Vararu (all of whom are less mature than her). She is a teenaged character, but she must deal with some very adult issues, as well as the usual stuff for a 17-year-old.

The Romanians: The Great Communist Bank Robbery

They knowingly risked their lives and reputation to steal money that was practically worthless. Even today their motives remain shrouded in mystery. Sadly, we cannot simply ask them, because the Communist regime executed nearly all of the accused bank robbers. Alexandru Solomon investigates the unlikely caper and the state’s sinister response in The Great Communist Bank Robbery, which screens, which screens as part of Film Forum’s current retrospective, The Romanians: 30 Years of Cinema Revolution.

If the circumstances of the 1959 Romanian bank heist sound familiar, perhaps you saw Nae Caranfil’s excellent narrative film, Closer to the Moon, starring Mark Strong and Vera Fermiga. Although there is a lot we do not know about the incident, due to the regime’s secrecy, the British drama sticks fairly close to the facts as Solomon establishes them.

At that time, Romanian leu were officially unconvertible, due to Romania’s self-imposed isolation. Even in Romanian, leu were practically worthless, because there was practically nothing available in stores, under socialism. Not surprisingly, everyone was desperate for Western hard currency. That is why security was relatively lax for cash transports from the central bank.

There is little debate on the how’s of the robbery, in large part because the robbers re-enacted the caper for a Party-produced propaganda film titled Reconstruction. Solomon uses the film as a lens through which he refracts the Great Bank Robbery case as well as the fundamental realities of life under Communism. He incorporates extensive excerpts, sometimes screening them against the imposing architectural facades left behind like relics of the old regime.

Where Reconstruction most notably departs from the truth is in its depiction of the bank robbers themselves. According to the propaganda film, they were essentially adventurers and anti-social criminals of one sort or another. However, the truth is they were all former Communist Party members in good-standing. They also happened to be Jewish, caught up in the Party’s anti-Semitic purges.

The Romanians: Luxury Hotel

For filmmakers, the advantages of living through a real-life dystopia include the highly cinematic locations the regimes leave behind. Of course, for Dan Pita, there was no up-side when he was banned from filmmaking, because his 1983 film Sand Cliffs sufficiently perturbed Ceausescu. About a decade later, he filmed this weird surreal dystopian parable in the dictator’s former palace (now the parliament building). Once again, a sinister and capricious “boss” rules over the exploited workers in Pita’s Luxury Hotel, which screens during Film Forum’s new retrospective, The Romanians:30 Years of Cinema Revolution.

Alex is an earnest plugger, who thinks he has arrived when he is appointed manager of the Hotel’s flagship restaurant, but as soon as he tries to make improvements, the “boss” slaps him down. Of course, that suits his chief rival and most of the wait staff just fine. Even though he is popular with the patrons (who could well be the surviving ruling class in this ambiguous dystopia), Alex is soon transferred to the Hotel’s warehouse. However, Alex is a restaurant manager at heart. He will petition the Boss and generally drive his former employees to distraction in his efforts to regain his position.

Meanwhile, there are hints of a civil war going on outside and perhaps even inside the hotel. There could very well be a power struggle going on. We never get a good look at the Boss, but he might be a succession of figureheads, somewhat like Number 2 in The Prisoner. Yet, nobody seems to be aware of any of these wider conflicts, except Marta, the privileged femme fatale who makes no secret of her interest in Alex.

The world of Luxury Hotel shares common elements with Late August at the Hotel Ozone and Snowpiercer, but it is superior to both of those films. Frankly, its vision of class conflict within the paranoid surveillance state is not particularly ground-breaking, but the visuals are quite striking. The decaying but still ostentatious palace is indeed quite a sight to behold, which Pita and his cinematographer, Calin Ghibu, fully capitalize on. You truly couldn’t create sets like this.

The Romanians: The Oak

According to this depiction of the dark, waning days of Ceausescu’s regime, a sort of double-negative principle applied in Romanian. The system was insane, so those who were mad were actually sane. This would describe Nela and Mitica to a “T.” They both have a knack for speaking embarrassing truths and making people around them feel awkward. It is hard to hide behind lies nobody believes when they are around in Lucian Pintilie’s classic The Oak, which screens during Film Forum’s new retrospective, The Romanians: 30 Years of Cinema Revolution.

As the film opens, Nela is not dealing well with the death of her beloved father, a member of the secret police with a rather questionable record as a member of the WWII underground. She has been operating in a state of denial, while his days-old body molders in her bed. She even sets fire to the flat to chase off her estranged sister.

Eventually, she will have to move along, but she carries his ashes in a coffee can (that’s a family tradition for some of us). Her father wanted to donate his body to science, but Romania in the lack 1980s had a paucity of refrigeration and a surplus of corpses. Sort of starting over, she relocates to a provincial city, where she is roughed up by a gang of laborer on her first day. Fortunately, the brawling doctor Mitica saves her from the worst of it. She rather digs his two-fisted approach to bureaucracy, his commitment to medicine, and his rude sense of humor. A day or two later, they start acting like a couple, even though neither is really the affectionate sort. Nevertheless, they will stand side-by-side and face some pretty ugly harassment together.

The Oak is definitely an anarchic film, but its free-wheeling style will not trouble viewers who have drunk deeply from the wells of auteurs like Buñuel and Fellini. This is the sort of work that requires a bit of time to settle in. Initially, the shabbiness of the environment and Nela’s ragingly self-destructive behavior seem to work in concert to repel viewers, but she and Mitica evolve into grandly tragic heroes over the time.

Maia Morgenstern and Razvan Vasilescu are terrific as the unmoored but perfectly matched pair. They play off each other well (even for those of us relying on subtitles), while developing some effectively ambiguous chemistry. They run about and act out, but their quiet moments together really reverberate. On the other hand, the supporting cast, a colorful rogue’s gallery worthy of Daumier caricatures, provides no end of noise and chaos.