De ce trag clopotele, Mitica?

I went to the movie premiere. I was studying acting at the time and the classes were cancelled so all the students could attend the event. This movie marked the return of the "great" Pintilie from France. And, by the way, I studied acting at the beginning of the 90s. So, whoever wrote the article got the Romanian release year wrong. It must have been 1990 or 19991. Pintilie was long expatriated and living in France in 1982. No way Ceausescu would have been pleased with him running around Buftea or other locations, to make a movie and release it in Romania.

Anyway, I remember that, when we left the theater, at the end of the movie, weirdly enough, we all had terrible headaches, which everyone admitted to. What not everyone admitted to, though, was that Pintilie simply made a down-right mockery of the unique Romanian humor that Caragiale was the embodiment of.

I would characterise Romanian humor as positive, light-hearted and intelligent. What Pintilie did was to replace the intelligence with bitter sarcasm and the positiveness and light-heartedness with ill will and disdain. He used a notorious work of art to boost his homecoming, the same way he used a plethora of extraordinarily talented Romanian actors, in the making of this movie. I wonder if they knew what they were getting into...

No wonder no one laughed or even smiled during the presentation. Pintilie politicized a classic comedic masterpiece, to fit his agenda, whatever that was. He wanted to represent himself as an outspoken dissident, in a country that had recently overthrown a communist government. But where was he when that happened, because he returned to Romania after the fact.

I actually tried to find some blinding-shiny moments in Pintilie's career during the time he was living abroad but no record of such highlights seem to really exist. As if, only in Romania, he was unconditionally praised and welcomed with opened arms.

Is this why he was mad? Is this why he wanted to crush the essence of Romanian humor, because misery wants company? In my opinion, Pintilie acted like the teenager who runs away from home with unrealistic expectations and when he faces rejection, he comes back home and takes his frustrations on his parents.

I haven't met Pintilie in person but I met artists who knew him well. Some were fallen under his spell and some were not. But by all accounts, it seemed to me that Pintilie managed to build an aura of of intellectual and creative superiority around him. And no one was really willing to burst that bubble out in the open.

I cannot speak about Pintilie's work before France, because I'm not familiar with it. All I know is that I tried watching a couple of other movies that he made after his return and could not bear to watch them until the end. And, no, I'm not a brainless actor or lacking education. I would firmly say, quite the contrary. And this is why I don't care to fit in and go with the trend. This is why I cannot be fooled by smug intellectualism and pretentious accolades that have no base in reality, either. So, if this movie is "not so well known", maybe it's not really a "pearl". How about it?

Today I finally watched this movie with English subs, This movie looked bigger to me when all its dialogue was just a guess, when I first watched it, it was the Cairo festival the early 80's. I was a teenager, with good knowledge only of English, and the movie had no subtitles, by the middle of the show I said to myself: That is the best movie I ever seen, It was the transitions of the camera between the absolute and gross absurdity of a colorful human play and the gravity and silence of the horizon that made a distinction for this movie, almost all works centers about something, some meaning,

but this work centers about the idea of nothing?!which is the whole thing... all existence.

the idea of how trivial and frivolous all human desires and intentions are , a man brawling madly after a man to tell him : "don't slap me"!!!? a patriot shouting about patriotism while naked in a public bath !!? a man crying for the death of his dearest fellow, another man drinking in the honor of the occasion then a cow's mouth is chewing a branch in a lengthy shot, no big difference between most (seemingly) serious human emotions and the stomach emotions of a cow. (no exclamation needed!!) Three strong shots count: the sudden halt of the carnival(human life) and start of a serene but dirty landscape followed by the bells tolling, The dressed dog looking from the window in awe while the cast are singing carelessly out of tune opera, as if the dog was feeling something serious!, the dirty nature again with the shouting of a man's death and then the display of a white dog laying dead, then the zombie walk of the men in a slow rush to express the triviality of their life ending by death, (existence and what does it matter)

finally the carriage slipping into mist in a sign of drifting into eternity at last, but the director then ruins even that only possible meaning of humanity by entering himself into the camera shot talking in a microphone, by that confirming that even what could be called human destiny or eternity is also mediocre, an existence deprived of all meaning, why are they tolling the bells for? there is no such a thing as why, no reasons exist, why an onion?! an onion is just an onion , it could have been any thing else. The bells are tolling just because they have ropes attached to them, when it is moved the bell moves with it and ring, that is the whole story nothing else, not births not weddings, not funerals, not any human business that is the truth of it they toll because the ropes were pulled, and why? that's it because they are there! The ants living on the elephant's body , they cannot picture the whole elephant, but yet it seems possible occasionally.

Although not so well-known as others East European cinemas (Polish or Czech, for instance), the Romanian school managed to produce several high-quality movies. One of them -- some would say the best -- is "Why do they ring the bells, Mitica?".

Inspired by the work of the Romanian play-writer I.L. Caragiale, a bitter-funny witness of the 20th turn-of-the-century Romanian burgeois mores, the movie manages to grasp the cheap, frantic, colourful and slightly hysteric atmosphere of Caragiale's plays.

The movie's director, Lucian Pintilie, is one of the few success stories of the Romanian cinema. He turns the classical, linear plot of the play into a zigzagged scenario, combining it with several other Caragiale's short-stories. The result is a weird combination of crazy carnival scenes and short, alienated insertions reminding of Antognioni's "Red Dessert". A burlesque, fast-paced, snowball-like comedy (because, after all, *it remains* a comedy) with plenty of post-modernist auto-reflexivity and deep meditative undertones.

In fact, these undertones made the Communist regime to ban the movie during the '80s, considering it as having a strong subversive potential. (This was not the first Pintilie's banned movie in Romania: during the '70s, another one, "Reconstituirea", a satyric critique of the totalitarian Communist regime, was added on the black list of forbidden movies).

But, IMHO, the strongest part of this movie is not the director or the fact that it spoke up against a totalitarian regime. Its best moments reside in the tremendous performances of the actors. Rebengiuc, Dinica, Mihut, Diaconu, Vasilescu -- to name just a few -- give their best acting experience in this movie. It is a pity that they are not so well-known outside the Romanian cultural sphere...

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Think of this movie as a Romanian "Firemen's Ball" or a Balkanic "Il Vitelloni", but with a finger stuck on the fast-forward button, and you'll have a good approximation of it. :o)

Not the best cinematography (who cares?), not the best acting (who cares?), not the best script (who cares?), but... It has a story, it has wit, it has fire, it has no dead moments, it is true, it has a heart, it has a strong punch at the last scene... It has everything to want to watch it again, and again. You want to be one of them because being one of them makes your blood boils, makes you cry with them because of petty lies, makes you smell the sweat of the wild party... At dawn, when the fumes of the heavy drinking start to dissipate you want to pull yourself together because of the hard-to-digest answer.

It is where Kusturica was invented. It is where Kusturica learned his metier.

Isn't this enough for a true experience?

The basic value of this movie is rather conjectural than intrinsic. It acquired a mythical subversive quality, simply because the communist censorship of Romania brutally and unfairly banned it (going to such lenghts as even locking all the copies into a safe, where they stayed until the 1989 Revolution). In truth, the movie had nothing subversive, being only too brutal, misanthropic, naturalist and frivolous for the communists' taste. Pintilie's main (and childish!) mistake was to bring to open an essential dimension of Caragiale's satire that consisted in SUBTLETY. The great playwright's pieces seem to depict a vaudeville-like reality, in an innocuous and harmless comedy style - being based, in truth, on a very profound critical vision to the most essential vices and fallacies of human nature. Tempted by a shallow ambition to shock the sanctimonious communist censors, Pintilie raised this implicit element to a violently explicit level. Well, what he sought, he got! At a professional level, the movie is extremely in-equal, combining a really valuable stage heritage (powerful characters, exquisite performances, atrocious humor), with a totally amateurish movie-directing. Without any legitimate reason, it compiles onto the main play's storyline several other alien subjects from various short stories, thus becoming chaotic, messy and over-the-top. The mise-en-scene is usually skillfully conducted (Pintilie being a good theater director), but compromised by too many awkwardly framed and timed shots. Towards the end, everything becomes redundant, over-lenghtened and boring... And the final shot is a complete failure: without any aesthetic justification, Pintilie takes an auctorial distance, including in the picture his own camera-crew (only as a cheap and tacky trick), and himself, with the parting-shot: "Let them die stupid!" Such an attitude towards his own characters, by turning the critical distance into petty wickedness, is intolerably unprofessional.