Endstation Paradies

gray, cruel, cynical, poetic, dramatic, touching, maybe strange. the film of a state of soul. film of a profound crisis. and image of hope's lost. out of brutal language remains its special beauty. few magnificent scenes, few crazy scenes. and the splendid acting - Gheorghe Visu does one of his extraordinary roles. high result of a rare artistic team, work of a great director, it impose an admirable actor - Costel Cascaval who use , with force and precision, each trait of his character. a film about Romanian reality, a cry, it is a real good film. and after its end, that fact is only important. because the tension, the stories, the search of sense are only tools for an impressive movie. must see it ! and than it could become a kind of experience. not only an artistic one.

a cry. or , maybe, a parable. strange at first sigh. and painful confession about reality, dream, looking for happiness, definition of life. to say that it is a film by Lucian Pintilie could be enough. but not only the dark story, with a memorable last scene, not the profound message who can be understand only by East European public in its essential dimension are important but the fascinate performances of Dorina Chiriac and Costel Cașcaval. a film of fury and escapes, revenge against yourself and run to death, it is perfect example of beauty of mud and force of small people. aphorisms and crumbs from other films by Pintilie. and step of a personal fight against the images of every day reality of one of the most important Romanian directors.

Terminus Paradis is the movie that impressed me the most until now. It's about life and how to make a living. It's about the impossibility to make a family in Romania, because of hard living. The language is exactly the language of every Romanian: dirty, mean, sick, intrigant, etc. I personally know Costel Cascaval (Mitu in the movie) and I've discussed with him about this movie. Again I'm telling you: it's not a movie, it's a FACT, it's real life! And the actors, they're not acting, they just play their roles. Nothing is fake! Everything is reality! In the army service everything happens like you saw in the movie. In Romania, everything goes like it was presented there!

I found this to be a wonderful and beautiful look at rebelliousness and cries of the youth in a post-communist Romania. A world constantly influenced by American pop-music and cool American words heard on TV such as "piece of sh*t", or "son of a bitch".

It's a world in which Mitu strives for a better life and wishes to detach himself from the dependency on his family, especially his father's relations. After falling in love with Norica, a girl who seems to get him, he sets on marrying her and fleeing to America, where they shall meet Paradise.

Set on doing things his way, Mitu disobeys his superiors several times without caring for the repercussions. All he knows is that he wants Norica and he wants to reach America's shores. He is envious of his brother Nicu, whom their father has helped get away from the hardships found in Romania. But Nicu's life in America is not the wonderland that Mitu imagines it to be, as he has to eat from celebrities' trash bins and sleep on the streets. And I like how matters are not as black-and-white as Mitu believes them to be.

I thought that most of the performances were really great, with the exceptions with a few ones which I found to be questionable. Many of the shots of the landscape have a dream-like quality to them and made me think that in spite of the fact that people are just like pigs (as Mitu puts it), perhaps, just perhaps, Paradise may not be across the ocean in the America, but right there, in your own land.

Terminus Paradis in one word: a mirror of real life, with shocking ideas, shocking words and images. Under this, a simple, but exhaustive analysis of post-communist Romanian life. The simple action, built on an American-like image, shows the pathological typology of the new "capitalist" mentality, adapted from the elder East-European one. The reactions of post-communist changes are different. Violence, on one side (like Cafanu, the hero of the story) and passivity, on the other side (like his colonel) are just a flash aimed on the Romanian mind.