lucianghita

I am very disappointed after watching Manchevski's film this evening. I came to the screening with his masterpiece "Before the Rain" in mind but some of the elements that struck me most about the film were endlessly recycled imageries of death/memory/temporal boundaries, exoticized depictions of landscape, identity and cultural otherness, tautological and often overstated motifs of death and desire, which literally drown the spectator into a sea of clichéd, old-fashioned psychological thriller formulas. Don't get me wrong, I like films which foreground their rich, highly-tuned semiotic texture and which interweave symbolic structures skilfully and compellingly. But here this twofold directorial temptation towards the symbolic and the literal doesn't quite pay off cinematically. The music is great, some of the montage is also powerful, the initial spatio-temporal build-up promising, but the film never quite takes off for me. The surreal, nightmarish, ghostly presences that populate the screen and Lazar's troubled mind amount, in my opinion, to some of the interesting cinematic effects of the film.

A poignant depiction of the early anti-communist resistance in Romania, the film captures the arrival of forced collectivization to a remote village in Transylvania during the 1950's and the heavy toll it takes on the social and family life of the peasants. Margineanu's style combines striking sequences of cinema verite (the brutal tactics of interrogation used by the secret police) with stylized depictions of human suffering and endurance. Interwoven throughout the film are the dramatic stories of the members of a wealthy farmer's family, who refuses to give up his land and livestock. A traditional family ethos clashes dramatically with the marauding and corrupt state bureaucracy. As a result, a complete generation of Romanian peasants and intellectuals is brutally wiped off and replaced with a "new" obedient and violent mass of half-wits.

Released in 1992, three years after the fall of Ceausescu's regime in Romania, The Oak was the first film written and directed by the acclaimed director Lucian Pintilie upon his return home after many years of exile in France. Drawing on the brutal, absurd reality of a poverty-stricken Romanian society, the film depicts the story of Nela (Maia Morgenstern), a young schoolteacher pained by the recent death of her father, as she leaves home to take a low-paid job in a desolate small town outside Bucharest. Gang-raped by the locals and treated with contempt by the Communist authorities, she finds compassion and love in her relationship with Mitica (Razvan Vasilescu), a sardonic but good-hearted doctor at the local hospital. Deemed as the first world-wide smashing success of Romanian cinematography after 1989, the film uses both dark humor and gritty realism to ponder on the ethical dimensions of personal and collective values in the wake of the collapse of communism.