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.

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.

This is the worst film I've seen for as long as I can remember. It isn't even worth a thorough comment/review. Nicolaescu is obviously a delusional character (interesting - or better said, funny - to note that when the film was released he appeared completely drunk on the news, giving an unimaginably incoherent interview); I did expect something very cheesy but this just blew me away. Nothing is good in this film: incredibly bad acting, bad script, bad directing, you name it. This can't be considered a historical film. This film is a bad joke. "Rambo" is a historical masterpiece compared to this thing. The fact that this film was funded by the state (!!!!!!!!) should raise some eyebrows...

If you like movies with happy ending, don't watch this one. Is an dramatic movie about the Romanian revolution from 1989. For someone who didn't knew how it was back then, this is an awful movie, but for someone who lived the moments and lost someone (the wife of a fiend) who was murdered only for being in the wrong place at a wrong time, is an disturbing film who tried to show an unseen face of the events. In essence, the story is divided in two. One part is taking place in 1989 when a marine officer comes to Timisoara to marry his pregnant girlfriend, but ends being shot and taken to a crematory where it is burned alive. Meanwhile, his girlfriend gives birth to a boy on the stairs of the Cathedral in Timisoara. The other part of the movie take place in 2004, 15 years after, when a Romanian journalist who lived in France for the last 15 years, wants to write an article about that boy found on the stairs of the Cathedral in 1989 and tries to find that boy. This is it.

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.