Week of November 7, 2007, Issue #629
FILM
DVD Detective
BRIAN GIBSON / dvdetective@vueweekly.com
The two Romanian films of the past two years—Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu and Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days—which deservedly wowed Cannes, sparking talk of a cinematic mini-renaissance in that corner of Eastern Europe, aren’t light-hearted fare. Those who found humour in Puiu’s study of a slowly dying old man shunted from hospital to hospital were mining deep in the pitch-dark for some awfully black chunks of laughter. Mungiu’s is a devastating, relentless look at one woman’s struggle to get an abortion in Romania just before the Communist era ended, when people are snatching and scraping for what little they can get.Corneliu Porumboiu’s first feature, 12:08 East of Bucharest—now on DVD from Tartan—may start off slowly, among the peeled housefronts and battered streets of a small town that doesn’t look like it’s changed much since Dec 22, 1989, but we’re no longer in the capital, nor in the same mood as those two films.
Sure, local teacher Tiberius Mãnescu (Ion Sapdaru) owes a lot of people money and is just now groggily shaking himself out of a hangover. And Mr Pi?coci (Mircea Andreescu) is a pensioner in a cramped apartment, pissed off at local kids setting off firecrackers. But the deliciously understated comedy starts with TV station owner and call-in show host Virgil Jderescu (Teodor Corban), eager to find his classical mythology text jammed into his bookcase somewhere behind busts of Plato and Aristotle. Once he does, the high-minded, sententious fellow rings up someone, gets their recorded message and says, “I’m calling to say fuck your answering machine. Goodbye.”
Mãnescu and Pi?coci are Jderescu’s guests, and he has them on so he can determine, this December day in 2005, 16 years after the fall of the despot Ceausescu, “Was there a revolution or not in our town?” (Porumboiu explains in the director’s commentary that he was inspired after seeing a 1999 TV show on the same topic.) Single-take, unmoving shots are replaced now by the tilting or drifting camera in the studio. There’s no objectivity here, no fixed camera or fixed truth, as callers declare Mãnescu and three fellow teachers absent from any protests in the town square before Ceausescu left office at 12:08, while Mãnescu maintains he was there.
The lives of these three men in today’s Romania stand in eerie contrast to Jderescu’s askew, but oddly sincere, effort to enter the backdrop of the past and figure out if the townspeople were part of the revolt that started in Timisoara and Bucharest or just scared followers who joined in after Ceausescu was gone.
Jderescu drops irrelevant classical quotes and fatuous statements (“we love the truth, it’s healthy”), then snaps bitterly at the cameraman during a commercial break. A band of musicians would rather play a Latin tune than a sombre Romanian piece. The local Chinese immigrant shopkeeper, the brunt of casual racism, gets the last word after summing up the shabby capitalism that has settled in—he sells firecrackers to the kids because, simply, it’s “supply and demand.”
A wryly funny, surreal take on an epochal event, 12:08 East of Bucharest reminds us that revolutions aren’t always grand, ideal affairs to be nostalgic about, but can involve the mundane and the trivial, moments argued or regretted. And then life moves on, in its strange, beautiful way, as the snow falls on the town, streetlights flicker and the camera returns to its slow, steady gaze. V