De ce trag clopotele, Mitica?

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...

---

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)

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.

I stumbled upon this by chance and saw that it had been banned on release. I took a chance on the DVD, which if you get it is of pristine picture and audio quality; and what a revelation the film turned out to be. I agree with some of the other reviewers, this must have been where Kusturica got his inspiration for 'Underground.' The acting is superb across the board and as the mayhem escalates, so does the cleverness and general franticness of the cinematography - the whole thing is so tight and nothing, incredibly, seems forced. Another reviewer has remarked on the low technical elements of the film, I must admit, I didn't notice them. It's clearly a product of its time but holds up very well (I watched it in the tail end of 2020.) Lucian Pintilie is one of the giants of Romanian cinema and from the ones I've seen, this is probably his masterpiece. Seek it out, you're in for a special treat.

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.

this piece of art is an internal reflection of a the human being who doesn't know his origin nor his destination, no beginnings or endings symbolized by the vain corrupt actions that he might commit at any time and an open but morbid infinite sky which keeps on appearing above a gypsy land. most movies which had some of that, like Satan's tango, or Underground were not on the level of this movie, until today I haven't found the English translation, but this movie is like a song written by Ache and Jethro Tull and Paganini all together. The philosophical content of this movie is not present in Swedish works by Ingmar nor films like songs from the second floor. As a whole I haven't seen much art in American Cinema, so we may set this movie as the only movie to belong to art as in music and painting, and hence as the best film until today. Congratulations to the director.