De ce trag clopotele, Mitica?

Not the best cinematography (who cares?), not the best acting (who cares?), not the best script (who cares?), but... It has a story, it has wit, it has fire, it has no dead moments, it is true, it has a heart, it has a strong punch at the last scene... It has everything to want to watch it again, and again. You want to be one of them because being one of them makes your blood boils, makes you cry with them because of petty lies, makes you smell the sweat of the wild party... At dawn, when the fumes of the heavy drinking start to dissipate you want to pull yourself together because of the hard-to-digest answer.

It is where Kusturica was invented. It is where Kusturica learned his metier.

Isn't this enough for a true experience?

Although not so well-known as others East European cinemas (Polish or Czech, for instance), the Romanian school managed to produce several high-quality movies. One of them -- some would say the best -- is "Why do they ring the bells, Mitica?".

Inspired by the work of the Romanian play-writer I.L. Caragiale, a bitter-funny witness of the 20th turn-of-the-century Romanian burgeois mores, the movie manages to grasp the cheap, frantic, colourful and slightly hysteric atmosphere of Caragiale's plays.

The movie's director, Lucian Pintilie, is one of the few success stories of the Romanian cinema. He turns the classical, linear plot of the play into a zigzagged scenario, combining it with several other Caragiale's short-stories. The result is a weird combination of crazy carnival scenes and short, alienated insertions reminding of Antognioni's "Red Dessert". A burlesque, fast-paced, snowball-like comedy (because, after all, *it remains* a comedy) with plenty of post-modernist auto-reflexivity and deep meditative undertones.

In fact, these undertones made the Communist regime to ban the movie during the '80s, considering it as having a strong subversive potential. (This was not the first Pintilie's banned movie in Romania: during the '70s, another one, "Reconstituirea", a satyric critique of the totalitarian Communist regime, was added on the black list of forbidden movies).

But, IMHO, the strongest part of this movie is not the director or the fact that it spoke up against a totalitarian regime. Its best moments reside in the tremendous performances of the actors. Rebengiuc, Dinica, Mihut, Diaconu, Vasilescu -- to name just a few -- give their best acting experience in this movie. It is a pity that they are not so well-known outside the Romanian cultural sphere...

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Think of this movie as a Romanian "Firemen's Ball" or a Balkanic "Il Vitelloni", but with a finger stuck on the fast-forward button, and you'll have a good approximation of it. :o)

this piece of art is an internal reflection of a the human being who doesn't know his origin nor his destination, no beginnings or endings symbolized by the vain corrupt actions that he might commit at any time and an open but morbid infinite sky which keeps on appearing above a gypsy land. most movies which had some of that, like Satan's tango, or Underground were not on the level of this movie, until today I haven't found the English translation, but this movie is like a song written by Ache and Jethro Tull and Paganini all together. The philosophical content of this movie is not present in Swedish works by Ingmar nor films like songs from the second floor. As a whole I haven't seen much art in American Cinema, so we may set this movie as the only movie to belong to art as in music and painting, and hence as the best film until today. Congratulations to the director.

I was expecting for quite a while to see this movie, which is kind of a legend in the history of the Romanian cinema. Filmed at the beginning of the 80s and inspired by the work of the genial humorist and play-writer Caragiale, the film was banned until the fall of the Communist rule. Caragiale who lived and wrote 80-90 years ago was too actual and too subversive for the Romanian censorship, and so was the treatment he received under the hands of Pintilie, one of the greatest film and theater directors of Romania.

And yet I was disappointed, because the film is too much marked by the poor technical means of the Romanian cinema of that time. It is not that the film lacks vision. Using texts from Caragiale's plays and short stories Pintile creates a vision of Romanian low class suburbs ('mahala') which is both true to the past and present but also somehow prophetic for what Romania went through after the fall of the communism. An exquisite team of the best Romanian comedy actors gives great performances, with Mariana Mihutz shining over all other. And yet, the story telling lacks fluency, and the rhythms and colors are too often broken by the confusion created by poor technical quality. Too bad - this could have been a masterpiece of the Romanian cinema.

It had all the good premises: a great director, an all-star cast, and it was based on the works of a great author. Still...

After the first shocks triggered by its naturalism and the real delight of many memorable satirical scenes (the heated political discourse in the public bath, the chase in the barbershop, the 'patriotic' Marseillaise singing, the eulogy for Mitica, and so on), the viewer becomes a bit uncomfortable.

There is something over the top and inauthentic with all that boorish vulgarity and gratuitous violence, and most of all with the directorial post-modern 'reflections' (though his final verdict 'Let them die stupid' is not that exaggerated, as Caragiale himself has said he hated his characters). It's like seeing the world only through dark lenses.