De ce trag clopotele, Mitica?

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.

The basic value of this movie is rather conjectural than intrinsic. It acquired a mythical subversive quality, simply because the communist censorship of Romania brutally and unfairly banned it (going to such lenghts as even locking all the copies into a safe, where they stayed until the 1989 Revolution). In truth, the movie had nothing subversive, being only too brutal, misanthropic, naturalist and frivolous for the communists' taste. Pintilie's main (and childish!) mistake was to bring to open an essential dimension of Caragiale's satire that consisted in SUBTLETY. The great playwright's pieces seem to depict a vaudeville-like reality, in an innocuous and harmless comedy style - being based, in truth, on a very profound critical vision to the most essential vices and fallacies of human nature. Tempted by a shallow ambition to shock the sanctimonious communist censors, Pintilie raised this implicit element to a violently explicit level. Well, what he sought, he got! At a professional level, the movie is extremely in-equal, combining a really valuable stage heritage (powerful characters, exquisite performances, atrocious humor), with a totally amateurish movie-directing. Without any legitimate reason, it compiles onto the main play's storyline several other alien subjects from various short stories, thus becoming chaotic, messy and over-the-top. The mise-en-scene is usually skillfully conducted (Pintilie being a good theater director), but compromised by too many awkwardly framed and timed shots. Towards the end, everything becomes redundant, over-lenghtened and boring... And the final shot is a complete failure: without any aesthetic justification, Pintilie takes an auctorial distance, including in the picture his own camera-crew (only as a cheap and tacky trick), and himself, with the parting-shot: "Let them die stupid!" Such an attitude towards his own characters, by turning the critical distance into petty wickedness, is intolerably unprofessional.

I stumbled upon this by chance and saw that it had been banned on release. I took a chance on the DVD, which if you get it is of pristine picture and audio quality; and what a revelation the film turned out to be. I agree with some of the other reviewers, this must have been where Kusturica got his inspiration for 'Underground.' The acting is superb across the board and as the mayhem escalates, so does the cleverness and general franticness of the cinematography - the whole thing is so tight and nothing, incredibly, seems forced. Another reviewer has remarked on the low technical elements of the film, I must admit, I didn't notice them. It's clearly a product of its time but holds up very well (I watched it in the tail end of 2020.) Lucian Pintilie is one of the giants of Romanian cinema and from the ones I've seen, this is probably his masterpiece. Seek it out, you're in for a special treat.

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.

I went to the movie premiere. I was studying acting at the time and the classes were cancelled so all the students could attend the event. This movie marked the return of the "great" Pintilie from France. And, by the way, I studied acting at the beginning of the 90s. So, whoever wrote the article got the Romanian release year wrong. It must have been 1990 or 19991. Pintilie was long expatriated and living in France in 1982. No way Ceausescu would have been pleased with him running around Buftea or other locations, to make a movie and release it in Romania.

Anyway, I remember that, when we left the theater, at the end of the movie, weirdly enough, we all had terrible headaches, which everyone admitted to. What not everyone admitted to, though, was that Pintilie simply made a down-right mockery of the unique Romanian humor that Caragiale was the embodiment of.

I would characterise Romanian humor as positive, light-hearted and intelligent. What Pintilie did was to replace the intelligence with bitter sarcasm and the positiveness and light-heartedness with ill will and disdain. He used a notorious work of art to boost his homecoming, the same way he used a plethora of extraordinarily talented Romanian actors, in the making of this movie. I wonder if they knew what they were getting into...

No wonder no one laughed or even smiled during the presentation. Pintilie politicized a classic comedic masterpiece, to fit his agenda, whatever that was. He wanted to represent himself as an outspoken dissident, in a country that had recently overthrown a communist government. But where was he when that happened, because he returned to Romania after the fact.

I actually tried to find some blinding-shiny moments in Pintilie's career during the time he was living abroad but no record of such highlights seem to really exist. As if, only in Romania, he was unconditionally praised and welcomed with opened arms.

Is this why he was mad? Is this why he wanted to crush the essence of Romanian humor, because misery wants company? In my opinion, Pintilie acted like the teenager who runs away from home with unrealistic expectations and when he faces rejection, he comes back home and takes his frustrations on his parents.

I haven't met Pintilie in person but I met artists who knew him well. Some were fallen under his spell and some were not. But by all accounts, it seemed to me that Pintilie managed to build an aura of of intellectual and creative superiority around him. And no one was really willing to burst that bubble out in the open.

I cannot speak about Pintilie's work before France, because I'm not familiar with it. All I know is that I tried watching a couple of other movies that he made after his return and could not bear to watch them until the end. And, no, I'm not a brainless actor or lacking education. I would firmly say, quite the contrary. And this is why I don't care to fit in and go with the trend. This is why I cannot be fooled by smug intellectualism and pretentious accolades that have no base in reality, either. So, if this movie is "not so well known", maybe it's not really a "pearl". How about it?