Näher am Mond

Enjoyed watching this last night, good fun and a little less ordinary . well worth a watch

You've probably never heard of the Ioanid Gang, or the bank robbery that they carried out in Bucharest in 1959. I had never heard of it before I watched Nae Caranfil's "Closer to the Moon". The movie isn't any kind of masterpiece, but sufficiently looks at this incident, and how Romania's Soviet-backed government arrested the gang and forced them to star in a propaganda film reenacting the robbery.

One of the thing that we notice while watching the movie is the hypocrisy of the Eastern Bloc governments. They claimed that they were establishing classless societies but there was a high society (and the people in the government had no qualms about themselves jewelry). Later on, Nicolae Ceaușescu forced women to have as many children as possible, which overfilled Romania's orphanages. Most of the heads of state in the Eastern Bloc were typical ideologues, but Ceaușescu sounded like a mental case.

Anyway, the movie's worth seeing.

Vera Farmiga and Mark Strong played Romanian Jewish Communists who along with three others plot to rob the Romanian State Bank, a crime punishable by death. The court and country decide to use the case to teach a lesson in propaganda film. The burglars are acting as themselves in this film. The burglary was more about robbing the bank but anti-Communist. There is a nice romance in the film as well. Vera Farmiga and Mark Strong gave the best performances in the film. I would have liked to know more about it. The film was shot on location abroad.

Much like JFK's assassination, the Great National Bank Robbery of 1959 is shrouded in mystery, the first being whether the robbery did in fact take place (or was instead fabricated to justify the purging of undesirable party members), and the second concerning the motives for the robbery. Here, Caranfil depicts the robbery as a real event symbolizing an act of resistance against a communist regime that has failed to live up to its ideals. It's an idealistic plotline that molds the protagonists into crafty anti-establishment heroes, and that's fine in principle, but I don't think he manages to convey his story convincingly.

The main problem is that Caranfil empowers his protagonists to the point where it becomes difficult to feel pathos for them. Rather than endowing them with a tragic backstory to make their suicide mission believable, he depicts them as privileged party members who live care-free and suffer from existential boredom more than anything else. And although their fate is ultimately in the hands of the authorities, they always seem to be in control of the situation: they plan and execute the heist without a hitch, knowing that they will get caught; they laugh at the authorities during their trial, and they make a mockery of the film shoot without getting reprimanded.

As far as authenticity is concerned, it also doesn't help that the director chose an English-speaking cast and portrays communist Romania as a rather idyllic setting (granted the late 1950s were a more liberal era than what came afterwards). That said, I give him credit for at least shooting it in Bucharest and having the actors pronounce the Romanian names accurately.

To be fair, it's not a terrible movie from any technical standpoint (acting, set design, cinematography, etc.) and I found it both genuinely funny and cringy, because you can't overlook the absurdity of 1950s Romanians speaking English with British accents (note: if you enjoy that, I recommend the 2017 TV-series Comrade Detective). But my impression is that the director missed a golden opportunity to create a black comedy that is both tragic and comic, choosing instead to shoot a light-hearted parody.

In reality, something happened. Some people have been executed without being guilty. They have been forced to play a role in their fake trials and all ended in their execution. A false history was created by some top authorities in order to teach some kind of a lesson to the people that worked in the communist regime structures. This movie was not made for the public. This false reenactment most probably inspired Lucian Pintilie to create a cinematographic masterpiece, Reconstruction (1968). Add to that the fact that Pintilie's film has been done in those crazy times, when you could have gotten into big trouble for criticizing the regime.

Now, here comes Caranfil, a great director, that takes the original story and twists it once again, turning these people into courageous heroes that opposed the regime. They get into a suicidal mission just to send a message. How much believable is that? Does this bring justice to the original six persecuted people? I'm not sure about that. There's a documentary, called Marele Jaf Comunist (The Great Communist Robbery) that reveals more of the true story. Anyway, a drama is not supposed to tell the real story, and that's OK, but in this case, it's a pity that some people will take it as history.

The real six people have been persecuted in communist style with fake trials and five of them were killed. They were Jews and they were high professionals. Moreover, ironically, they had a history in participating successfully in bringing the communism to Romania. So, why did the regime chose them in order to teach a lesson to the other communists, and probably to the Jewish communists?

The movie might leave you with the impression that all Jews were persecuted under the communism. Many of them they were. The Russian occupation brought suffering to all kinds of Romanian citizens. But many of the Jews supported the regime since the beginning.

I know that many of the Jews have been disappointed by the communism that they previously believed in. Most of the Jews went to Israel sometimes in the Sixties, but also, many Jews supported the communist repression, leading to massive deportation, imprisonment and execution of hundreds of thousands of Romanian citizens. You will not see this in the movie.