SLIFF 2009 Review: HOOKED (Pescuit sportiv)

A pair of illicit lovers experience a memorable picnic afternoon after they hit a prostitute with their car in the odd new Romanian film HOOKED. It’s a slight but realistic story told more or less in real time that’s unfortunately buried under a distracting and misguided experiment in subjective camera work. Lubi (Ioana Flora), a 40-ish math teacher and Mihai (Adrian Titieni) at first appear to be a typical bickering couple who set out for a picnic just to unwind after a stressful week. Encountering annoying window washers and daylight prostitutes at every corner, there’s considerable tension between the two that just gets worse when Lubi runs their car over a prostitute named Ana (Maria Dinulescu), apparently killing her. Mihai wants to notify the police but Lubi is worried about the scandal it will cause since she’s actually married to another man and talks him into hiding the body in the woods. As they’re preparing to bury her, Ana suddenly wakes up. She’s not hurt at all so Lubi and Mihai naturally invite her to join them on their picnic. Topless but for a bright red bra and always working her ample sexuality, Ana spends the remainder of HOOKED infiltrating their relationship, exploiting their weaknesses, and driving a cruel wedge between them.

Ana is easily the most intriguing character in HOOKED. It’s unclear if she’s manipulating Lubi and Mihai just for kicks or out of revenge but it’s obvious that she’s focused on harming the lovers relationship. She seems naïve at first, yet as the film progresses, she’s reveals herself to be shrewder yet more sincere than these academics and Maria Dinulescu is excellent in this complex role. Ioana Flora and Adrian Titiene are less interesting by contrast and their characters too unpleasant and self-centered for the audience to root for. HOOKED is shot entirely in a first person perspective that breaks cinematic ground by using a hand-held subjective camera to allow the viewer to see exclusively through the eyes of one of the characters on screen, a camera that alternatively substitutes its point-of-view between each of the three main players (and also to the secondary and cameo ones). This results in a lot of intimacy but ultimately it comes off more as a curious stunt. With the exception of the film’s final shot, the technique is never really exploited, leaving it to be a hollow gimmick that does nothing but call attention to itself (of course if the film had been shot from my point-of-view, there would have been more close-ups of Maria Dinulescu’s chest!). Shot with no obvious budget and running a scant 84 minutes, HOOKED is never dull but it’s more an avant-garde work of cinematic experimentation than a compelling narrative and I recommend it only to adventurous arthouse aficionados.

HOOKED will screen at the Tivoli on Thursday, November 19th at 7:15pm and on Friday, November 20th at 5:00pm during the 18th Annual Whitaker Saint Louis International Film Festival.