I’m an Old Communist Hag

2013 European Union Film Festival coverage

Dear Nicolae Ceausescu, Former Dictator,

Your specter looms large over modern-day Romanian life in Stere Gulea’s new film I’m an Old Communist Hag. Televisions buzz and chatter with impending news of a DNA test that will determine whether the bodies buried in your gravesite indeed belong to you and your wife. Meanwhile, a documentary is being shot about life during The Golden Era of Ceausescu (as you, yourself, so demurely christened it), requiring hundreds of volunteers to recreate the scenes of state-orchestrated adoration that used to greet you each time your helicopter alit or your motorcade zipped through the streets. Thankfully, this film doesn’t have to strain nearly as hard to make an impression.

One of those volunteers is Emelia, a sixty-something woman living modestly in a Bucharest suburb with her vendor husband. When she receives word that her daughter and soon-to-be son-in-law will be visiting from Canada, she seeks a small loan to feed her guests for the week. And it’s at one of these dinners that Emelia is revealed to be the communist hag of the title; pressed by her daughter, she admits that, yes, she preferred your good old days of communism to the shaky free market that threatens each day to swallow her family up.

This is a surprisingly common sentiment. Democracy hasn’t been a cakewalk for Romania. And neither has membership in the European Union. Many who lived through your rule are nostalgic for its security and steadiness. Romania always seemed to be the most progressive of Eastern Bloc nations (at least from the West’s point-of-view), but while you were careful to distance yourself from Russia’s geopolitical influence, you were, perhaps, the leader who carried forth Stalin’s style of authoritarian rule most vigorously—what with the crippling economic policies and the brutal suppression of dissenting viewpoints and all.

Those aren’t necessarily the things Emilia is pining for in this film. Even she isn’t sure what she misses exactly. For all the talk of the halcyon years of stable housing and employment, Emilia recalls, in a series of flashbacks, being kept away from her family in the days leading up to one of your factory visits. The reason? It’s never clear whether it was your phobia of germs or your sense of paranoia that required her to be quarantined before shaking your hand, which makes the situation even more disturbing. There is no reason. But Emilia nonetheless complies.

As played by the renowned Romanian actress Luminita Gheorghiu, Emilia is stout and strong-hearted and also completely adrift in the contemporary world; she frets over the worldwide financial crisis; she goes to get her hair cut and comes back with a bright-red punkish do. This sort of incarnate performance is deserving of no small number of superlatives, though what those superlatives might be, I can’t quite say. All of the adjective and metaphors typically used to describe great acting all seem a little too pompous. And if there’s one thing her performance isn’t, it’s pompous.

See, that’s the problem with epithets, Nicolae: they don’t aggrandize a person; they obscure. You may have created around yourself the most impressive cult of personality in Eastern Europe when that part of the world was replete with big personalities, but the names you gave yourself – genius, demiurge, titan, Prince Charming – are heavy with their own meaning, and do nothing, today, to define what kind of man you were. They do, however, shed a bit of light on what kind of leader you were.

Director Stere Gulea is a survivor of the lean artistic years under your rule – he made several films in the 70s and 80s, during the Communist studio system – and whether or not he shares Emilia’s conflicted feelings about Romania’s past, this much is for certain: he knows better than to give you credit for her wistfulness. It’s herself that she misses. The innocence of her daughter. The simplicity of youth. But not you. Sure, your specter looms large over this film. But that’s all you are, anymore: a ghost.

Sincerely,

Jared Young

Status: Air Mail (4/5)

Miracle

2013 European Union Film Festival coverage

Dear Kamila Zlatusková, Associate Producer,

There’s no murkier job description on a film set than that of the Associate Producer. How you personally earned this title, and what your responsibilities included, are anyone’s guess. Maybe you’re an up-and-coming big shot, or a bona fide number cruncher, or a valued creative partner, or a local string-puller, or someone the director just needed to pacify by slapping a label on you. If it’s the latter (as is often the case), I’m going to imagine you as a troubled Slovakian 15-year-old girl willing to do terrible, terrible things to get that title you desire – be it “associate producer” or simply “girlfriend”.  

I really hope I’m wrong. Drawing that parallel between you and Ela (Michaela Bendulova), the main character in Miracle, is far-fetched, right? Surely you would be smarter than selling yourself to human traffickers just so some asshole guy that you like can get himself out of debt. Because – spoiler alert for idiots – that might not go so well. Even if your plan is just to eventually “escape”.

Luckily, the way co-writer and director Juraj Lehotsky tells the story, I couldn’t help but feel sympathetic to Ela’s plight. Much like his main character, we as audience members are taken straight to a female re-education centre without any proper explanation. The resulting friction between the girls we meet there reveals more than enough for us to piece together what’s ailing Ela. Her father is not in the picture, her mother (Katarina Feldekova) is tired of dealing with a troubled teen, and there’s a mysterious man whose name is tattooed on her knuckles named Roby (Robert Roth). When Ela finds out she’s pregnant, she runs away to find Roby, but he’s hardly happy to see her, even before she breaks the news. In fact, she seems more like a forced-upon intern pushing for a full-time position than she does an actual girlfriend. 

Still, my sympathy rested squarely on Ela’s shoulders, since few other characters even register. And as the story skips quickly between scenes and seasons, brevity may be the film’s greatest virtue. At 78 minutes, Miracle manages to make a strong enough impression to recommend it as at least a cautionary tale to young stubborn women. Which, again, I’m sure you’re nothing like.

Making false associations,

Christopher

Status: Standard Delivery (3/5)

The Strange Case of Angelica

Dear Manoel de Oliveira, Director, 

You must tell me your secret. Echinacea? Gene supplements? Cryogenic freezing? It’s not that I find it amazing that you’ve lived to the ripe old age 103; no, Chinese peasants and Indian yogis do it all the time. What I find amazing is that you’ve maintained your artistic faculties to this late stage, and – perhaps more amazingly – are using them to pose questions about the very act of filmmaking that, after more than eight decades behind the camera, you’re still engaged in.

There’s a distinct timelessness to your 2010 film The Strange Case of Angelica. And I suspect it’s more than just the usual encroachment of Europe’s hefty cultural history. It’s impossible to tell, in the opening few scenes, what year the film takes places in. Only later, as we follow a sleek modern sedan cruising through the streets of a contemporary Portuguese city, is it clear we are rooted in the present.

But only sort of. Right, Manny? 

Anachronisms reign throughout; Isaac – a Jewish photographer who is summoned to the estate of a wealthy family to take a portrait of their recently deceased daughter – uses a 60s-era Leica, and his studio is decidedly analog: a lot of plastic bins filled with chemicals, developing proofs clothes-pinned to hanging wires. Ancient funerary customs are observed, yet references are made to the current European economic crisis and the study of antimatter.  

And still, this film feels a half-century old. At least. 

Why? The camera is heavy, rooted to the ground. With very few exceptions, it never tilts; never pans; never tracks. You’ve cut this story together from a series of carefully composed static shots. This aesthetic is reflected tonally. Your dialogue is straightforward; your plotting is linear. Some elements suffer this approach (Isaac’s relationship with his wisecracking lady landlord feels like something from a bad sitcom). Others, however, are buoyed by it. In the middle act, you conjure a strange dream sequence that might seem absurd except for how perfectly it represents the ideas at the heart of your film: the tension between new and old. 

Funny how one might watch this and, not knowing the filmmaker is a centenarian, accuse the auteur of not knowing enough about film theory. But it’s the opposite of that, isn’t it? It’s not a lack that we see onscreen; rather a stripping-down to the essentials. In fact, one of Isaac’s fellow lodgers uses an apt filmic metaphor in that discussion about the duality of matter and antimatter: “No big special effects, like on a Hollywood movie.”

I guess, then, your advice about defying the laws of aging is right there in the film: the old is the fundament upon which everything new is built. 

When Isaac gazes out of his window, one afternoon, and spies a group of laborers working in the vineyards on the other side of the river, his landlady asks him why he’s so interested in watching them “work the old-fashioned way.” 

Isaac tells her: “Old-fashioned work interests me.” 

She counterpoints: “They’re the only ones who do it the old way. Now we use machines.”

Yes, everyone else is obsessed with the machinery, but you, Manoel— you’re doing it the old way. Bravo!

Com carinho,

Jared Young 

Status: Air Mail (4/5)

The Phantom Father

Dear Barry Gifford, Co-writer and Actor,

Like the main character in The Phantom Father, I felt compelled to do some research about history. Specifically, your history. I was curious how someone with a decidedly non-Romanian name gets not only a small role, but a co-writer credit on a Romanian film. And then I felt shame. You wrote Wild at Heart! And Lost Highway! I love David Lynch – I should know this!

With that embarrassing hole in my cinematic knowledge filled in, the pieces quickly fell into place. Your involvement with the movie suddenly made a lot more sense: the road movie structure; the off-the-wall gangster characters; the maybe-they-are, maybe-they-aren’t dream sequences. Only one thing seemed to not fit; how did this become a romantic comedy?

I’m guessing this is where director and co-writer Lucian Georgescu comes in. He must have thought it would help to lighten the mood by focusing on blossoming love. Well, if he did, he was wrong. It’s not so much that this aspect is bad—the slow and tentative relationship feels honest—it’s that when everything else comes in, the movie completely derails.

Robert Traum (Marcel Lures, in a stiff performance, possibly due to his not-very-successful American accent) is an American professor who travels to Romania to research his Romanian Jewish rots and learn about the father he barely knew. There he meets Tanya (Mihaela Sirbu, relaxed and charming), a local historian who agrees to be his driver and guide. There’s your road movie. I suppose adding some light romance was a pretty simple graft. I could have seen this becoming one of those foreign movies that, as promised in 1990s-era Miramax trailers, “celebrates everything you love about life!”

But there’s more. The couple’s search eventually leads them in pursuit of Sami, one of Robert’s father’s oldest friends. Sami travels the countryside in a caravan, showing movies in an ad-hoc theatre. He’s also pursued by gangsters. We are told he was kicked out of his town by a corrupt mayor who is fixing to replace Sami’s theatre with a shopping mall, even though his dilapidated town looks to have a population of 300. For some reason though, the mayor and his two gangster thugs still chase Sami through the countryside and remind him that no one likes the movies he shows. That’s about as threatening as they get.

Once all these characters are introduced, The Phantom Father really doesn’t know what to focus on anymore. Is it about Robert’s relationship to his past? His interest in Tanya? Is it a caper about outsmarting the gangsters? Is Robert imagining all of this? These aren’t rhetorical questions. I’d like you to tell me because the film never answers them.

Things got so muddy that by the end, I was wondering if large portions of what I saw were dream sequences. There is one for-sure sequence around the film’s midpoint that is clearly a dream, but refreshingly, didn’t end with a character waking up from sleep. That omission—along with an elliptical, disruptive editing style that I couldn’t find any rhyme or reason for—made me question the reality of anything that came after it, especially as things got more outlandish and possibly violent. (Yes, possibly more violent: a secondary, harmless character seems to meet an untimely, uncalled-for end. Off-camera. I think.)

So yes, Barry, I’m throwing all of this back to you because, as the original source for this material, you must know where things came apart. Right? Maybe you can even describe it all to me, DVD commentary-style, as I watch the movie again. The same way a character in The Phantom Father, in a key moment, explains exactly what we’re seeing in an old silent film, instead of letting the images tell the story. You know, the way movies are supposed to work.

Dreamily—or not?—yours,

Casey

Status: Return to Sender (2/5)

Holy Motors

Dear Mathilde Profit, Continuity

If there was ever a film that didn’t require your services, Holy Motors might be it.

Leos Carax has crafted a story that sidesteps logic at every turn to manufacture a transparent – but bizarrely absorbing – reality. We quickly abandon accusations of “well, that doesn’t make sense” and surrender ourselves to the simple conceit: someone, somewhere within the film, is orchestrating the actions of the main character. Who it is doesn’t really matter. Not when the circus is so engrossing.

The mysterious puppeteer’s muse is played by Denis Lavant, a performance artist who is driven from one strange assignment to another. He goes by many names and many faces (enough to make even the actors in Cloud Atlas jealous), all in the service of a trying to create beauty in sex, violence, poverty, parenthood, or death. In the back of a limo, he prepares for each task with the silent dedication of an assassin. He treats the outside world as his stage, preferring to watch the passing landscape through a television feed rather than look directly out the window. His filtered reality is that strong—and it’s one of the most consistent strengths of the film.

At one point, the performance artist observes that cameras used to be bigger than he was, then they shrunk to become the size of his head, and now they’re so small he can ‘t even see them. We can assume, therefore, that when he’s eating flowers, fingers, money, or hair (for example), someone is watching. Between getting shot and stabbed, he has quiet moments as a disappointed father and dying grandpa—even a few musical outbursts. This is a twisted tale that exists to be audacious. When he plays a naked Christ-figure in living tableau with the Virgin Mary (played by Eva Mendez), he does so with a full erection.

Accepting the countless oddities that fill each frame is one thing, but the larger questions still remain. Does it all add up? Is the film more commentary than it is compelling? Do strong individual sequences (such as the acrobatic sexual acts in a green-screen room) say something about the nature of entertainment, or something about the characters themselves? The answers are as piecemeal as the film itself. The sequence with Kylie Minogue certainly does a lot to invest some much needed emotion to the mayhem—but it’s nearly undermined by a comically nonsensical final shot that literally brings to life the film’s title. Yet it all works. Somehow. And I’m not sure how you pulled that off.

Maybe in the end, your job was just to make sure people weren’t sure exactly what’s going on – to keep us guessing. That would make perfect sense, after all.

Continuously yours,

Christopher

Status: Air Mail (4/5)