Racconti dell'età dell'oro

A time. And its crumbs. Nothing more. Game of testify and irony, pieces of lost memories and joy to describe, not very bad, Romanian Communism. The details are not important. The exaggeration is only for taste. It is not a documentary. But an exercise to say truth in soft way. So, it is nice and amusing. A form to imagine a death world who lives in every slide of Romanian reality. A story about people in the skin of totalitarian regime. A masterpiece if compare it with Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceaușescu. With small ambitions and great sense of ridiculous. With desire to amusing and rediscover years when to survive was the first preoccupation. And title of two talented young directors. That is all.!

There's pretty much no in-between when it comes to this particular movie. In order to love it, one would first need to fully grasp the social environment of the late 80's in eastern Europe. Having achieved that, the movie will suddenly become amazingly familiar. Of course, to a westerner, the movie may seem bland, with very mild comedic content, but to a eastern European, this movie will bring laughter throughout the runtime. In fact, I joined IMDb just to write about it. Yes, I found it to be that good.

There are multiple factors that make this movie so enjoyable, starting with the fact that it is based on urban legends that used to circulate in Romania during the pre 1989 period (and in fact, long afterward as well), and ending with the amazingly detailed portrayal of the characters, while still maintaining a strictly necessary list of features needed to best summarise them. I'd go as far as to compare this movie to "Goodbye Lenin", which is a movie aimed at the same target as this one. I remember watching "Goodbye Lenin", and shedding a tear in the end, due to the amazing feeling of familiarity that it had brought on the screen. While "Tales from the Golden Age" will not have such a dramatic effect on you, I can assure anyone familiar with the eastern Europe social context of the 80's, that they'll definitely enjoy the movie. Of course, should one wish to nitpick, you'd find various anachronisms, mainly related to the props used, but then again, these anachronisms only helped us remember what the actual objects used to be like back then.

Personally, I give it a 9, simply because I consider 10 to be a mark every director should strive to achieve, but never succeed.

I was born in Bucharest in 1980 and we lived there till we emigrated to Canada in 88. I remember a lot of these type of situations vividly. The pig in the apartment....I almost bloody died laughing. The Ceausescu hat one....brilliant. This is movie was absolutely hilarious if you lived, or know, what living in Eastern Europe at that time was like. The lineups for groceries, the lack of basic neccesities, hot water only in certain times of the day, having to line up and push your car to get gas, having to "know a guy" to get certain thing be it gas, meat, bread, fruit.....Romanians became very resourceful. Its movies like this that make me proud of Romanian cinema!!

I love Kieslowski's films of morally compromised lives in communist Poland. But communist Poland was never half as scary as Ceacescu's 'Golden Age' in Romania, which is perhaps why it's only now that Romanain cinema appears to be enjoying it's own golden era, with many great films looking back at the dictatorship and its legacy. Chris Mungiu's 'Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days' is perhaps the finest of them; here he has scripted a bunch of illustrative (and not necessarily so tall) tales, which are directed by himself and a number of collaborators (though who produced which episode is not acknowledged). In some ways, the first tale (about an official visit) is almost unbeatable, a black comedy that had me laughing out loud; the last (about a couple of bottle-stealers) has the most obvious stylistic echoes of Mungiu's own work. But all of them capture the mixture of poverty, deference, fear and, paradoxically, individual selfishness, that characterised life under communism. The stories are superficially slight, but the smallest of transgressions carry grotesquely exaggerated weight Bitter wryness and naturalistic acting, camera work and dialogue, mark the films as a whole: a highly recommended set.

A Humorous Look at the Dark Days of Communist Romania in the 1980's. A look back at Soviet Block Romania before transition - Ceacescu's

so-called 'Golden Age', and told in a series of short stories and

events based on urban legends that used to circulate in Romania

during that period. The dark humour, stoicism and pathos are abundant

and the whole cinematic experience is a true joy to watch. Tales from

the Golden Age can be equally likened to other slow paced cinema

gems such as Lake Tahoe, Vodka Lemon, Goodbye Lenin, The Return, 4

Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days, The Banishment and the wonderful Legacy. It

is one of those films that you can watch over and over again and

still find something new. So much different from standard mainstream Hollywood formula tosh of

today. To me they all provide to an outsider an education and greater

understanding of these peoples and places. An absolute gem.