15

First time when my son brought home the CD with "15", we just had a look. And we reacted.

We saw the opening credits, with the long list of acknowledgements - and we laughed our asses off.

We saw the opening shot, with that ferris wheel - and we laughed our asses off.

We fast-forwarded to a scene where Maia Morgenstern is in a sewer and calls for someone - and we laughed our asses off.

We FF-ed even more, to some militiamen invading an apartment - and we laughed our asses off.

We switched at random, to find a scene self-pastiched from "Revansa" (some guy jumping from a bridge on a train carriage) - and we laughed our asses off.

...This was the first impact.

After a while, we gathered enough patience to sit down and watch all the movie. And we both reached to the same conclusion: It made no difference. Really none.

And we cried our eyes off.

I went to the cinema to see this one, but I left after almost an hour. I learned my lesson after watching Orient Express and I did't stay for the whole thing again. Unlike Clint Eastwood who makes great movies at his age, Sergiu Nicolaescu just got old and makes movies that only he and people who remember the "good old times" like. Sergiu did make a few good movies "at his time", but it's time to stop and maybe help others. This movie, 15, is as bad as it gets, don't waste your time and even if you have nothing to do but watch this movie, do nothing! I'm not sure how the script for this movie ever won an award, because it's awful, it's got nothing new and some of the worse character lines I've ever heard. The cast is good, but without a director it all falls apart.... I saw a few comments by people who liked the movie. The only way someone can say 15 was a good movie is if that someone worked on the production of this movie or hasn't seen it. Because everyone I know curses the time spent watching this movie.

It seems that 15 it's a film raising some very serious questions about how cinema may be a source of coping with our recent history. Is 15 - a film that evokes the days of the Romanian Revolution from December 1989 which led to the new achieved Romanian democracy - a good piece of cinema because it brings back those tragic moments? For me, this film is a failure. Not a complete failure, but still a failure. The film implies an emotional impact on those who know what the December '89 Revolution was all about: the journalist who comes, after 15 years, to Romania, to find a child who was born during those days, a journalist who is searching for the way Romanians dealt with the moment they gained their freedom. Unfortunately, the technique spoils this whole idea: the sound and the music are appalling, the dialogues are artificial, the shooting is dull. They really make this film un-watchable and make you wonder on the so-called "great Romanian directors"...

It is said that those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to re-live them. This movie is about the mistakes of the past. It's one of the most dramatical movies I've ever seen. It's about the tragedy of one family during the bloody events that took place in Timisoara, Romania, in December 1989, that ended with the collapse of the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu and the death of 1100 people.

The movie is called 15, because the events took place over time, both in December 1989 and December 2004, when a Romanian journalist from a Parisian newspaper returns to Romania to write an article about the changes from the collapse of Ceausescu's regime, 15 years ago. She's in the search of a child told to have been born in the orthodox cathedral in Timisoara, in the days of the Revolution of 1989. The most scenes of the film take place in December 1989 and represent the drama of this boy's parents.

It definitely worth seeing.

The idea of the movie is a good one.

The actors are well known Romanian actors and they put up quite a good acting.

Of course, there are a lot of flaws in the movie, including super acting (pretty unusual for Sergiu Nicolaescu). Also don't expect any special effects, even if the movie action is placed as time and space in the Romanian revolution from 1989.

Although the Romanian revolution is only the background for the main story so probably that's why you don't get the real feeling of how it really was (or maybe it was intentionally made this way to emphasize the perception of the main characters on the Revolution).

Overall is a nice movie, but if you're very selective with what you watch to, probably you should skip this one.