The Distance Between Me and Me

They succeeded in making a dissident out of a poet that was so central to communist propaganda, that she was present in all literature manuals. A proletcultist artist, intelligent and with plenty of affairs, that was made to look just a feminist that opposed real socialism and criticized Ceausescu. She was a icon of the time and an activist for the communist cause. She had a very privileged status, thats why she was allowed to criticize the rulers. The old lady that she became shows no remorse, nor regret, she has nothing interesting to say about the intellectual and social atmosphere of the time. She portrays herself as an idealist. She did not leave the country until 1985. Her American partner is a nobody, from intellectual perspective and her life in NY was a failure, still she did not come back, probably because she could have been subjected to a lot of critics, for her support and for being a beneficiary of the communist regime. What I learned is that old age is not as we should expect an age of wisdom, nor one of introspection and doubt over what mistakes and what pathways one should have taken, nothing but a decaying body with a superficial mindset.

I am very subjective about Nina Cassian. I love her late poetry, I was fascinating about her life, from chameleon adaptation to the expectations of Communism regime to the love stories and forms of resistance. Obvious, she is more a character than a person and this character, a sort of comfortable and practical shield is the only significant, made in decades, with high care and good bricks of ingenious hypocrisy. The film is real well crafted. This is its basic virtue. In same measure, it is a seductive portrait, maybe too seductive. Short, a Romanian poet telling her story about herself. Subjective and silked. A personal truth, nice for new generations or foreigners, melancholic for the people knowing the large slices of of original tale.