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Have you ever been in theather watching a stage play and just been waiting for the pause so you could leave?

Here, you can quit anytime, because this stage play has been recorded and sold as a movie.

It took me seven days and eleven attempts to watch this to the end. I did it because the archive shots were great. And because the story would have been interesting.

Howabout exiting?

No.

The biggest challenge was not to fall asleep while watching. The second was not to chuckle at parts that were meant to be dramatic.

The actors' work was to read the script like an elementary school student facing the camera. No acting at all, on purpose.

I've seen this type of stage style. This has been a trend and was meant to be hip in some contemporary German, Polish, and Eastern eu dramas in the mid-2000s.

And even back then, at least half of the audience gave up and went home in the middle.

This is a lowercase movie in so many ways. No writing, just archives, DJ-ed in a wannabe-interesting order. Choking on actors' play, making it not artistic but ridiculous. The biggest effort was to create the set.

It is a shock that the director, after "Aferim!", a truly great movie, came out with this failure.

Two star for the archive shots, and one for the plot and for the poor guy.

Let's hope this is just a dead track, and not a dead end.

Radu Jude , like many other romanian directors, makes movies for festivals, prizes and & co, he does NOT premieres his movies in Romania and makes no money from abroad where absolutely NO ONE is interested. Look at this movie earnings on box office mojo and laugh Verdict : 1* is enough.

The story the movie is based on is true and moving. The play that the movie adopted (not adapted, adopted, as in integrated with) might be good as well. Where the movie went off into the weeds for me was when the director decided to cut frequently and without any meaningful transition from the play (actors reading from old security service reports) to an eclectic assortment of TV clips from the era. The period clips have very little to do with the story. They neither complement the story nor does the sequencing of clips tell a story of its own. They're just filler, plain and simple. Big missed opportunity.

Radu Jude, the director, accepts in this film a difficult chalenge: to adopt a play whithout making it too stagy. He accomplishes to find a balance between theatre and cinema. And, although the sets are claearly theatrical and the archive footage's relation to the action is at best obscure ( sometimes even opaque ), the story is very interesting and it is well acted ( I don't know if Brecht's distancing effect is used on purpose. If yes, then it is superbly acted. ). In others words it is like a breeze for someone used to mainstream films.

I don't get why Radu Jude doesn't make straight documentaries. He seems passionate about historical subjects and themes, and yet he chooses to translate them into the forms of fiction cinema. The results, as is the case here, are boring and non cinematic. Here, he uses a theater play stage as vehicle for his story, mixed with communist era news clips which apparently have nothing to do with the story. Just adding context, atmosphere, whatever. The result is tedious and non watchable if you're into cinema. So either Jude likes the story and could have made a real movie on it, or he's after the historical value of the story and documents and he could've made a documentary. He chose both, so he got neither. Way to go.