Tag: Romania

GRADUATION – Review

(l-r) Dr. Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni) talks to his daughter Eliza (Maria Dragus), director Cristian Mungiu’s drama GRADUATION. Courtesy of Sundance Selects ©

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu grabbed international attention and the Palme d’Or with his 2007 pregnancy drama FOUR MONTHS, THREE WEEKS, AND TWO DAYS. That harrowing film presented a tour through Romanian creaky bureaucracy and a murky underworld of bribes and corruption in a story built on a controversial topic. In the director’s latest film GRADUATION, the subject is less heated, but it also explores the difficulties of life in Romania.

GRADUATION (“Bacalaureat”) centers on a doctor trying to ensure his straight-A student daughter’s best chance at a college scholarship in England, while showing the challenges and complexities of life in Romania. The subject is more universal – the desire of parents for the child to do well – but also paints a bleak picture of Romania life. The drama offers a subtle psychological and moral exploration set against a telling expose of a culture of corruption. At the same time, GRADUATION is a less dramatic and driven film that the director’s 2007 emotional juggernaut.

One thing that might be a challenge for some audiences is that GRADUATION seems so preoccupied with presenting the many difficulties of life in Romania, that it is well into the film before we are sure about the drama’s real focus. The film opens with a rock thrown through a living room window of a modest apartment in a drab modern apartment complex. The apartment is the modest home of Dr. Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni), his librarian wife Magda (Lia Bugnar), and their daughter Eliza (Maria Dragus, from Michael Hanneke’s WHITE RIBBON), and the small apartment and broken window hints at the difficulty of life in Romania.

The couple’s only child is on the verge of graduating high school, needing only to complete her final exams with a high score to win a scholarship to England. The girl is bright and hard-working, a good girl with good grades, and the doctor and his wife seem to have built their life around the daughter’s success, and escape to life in the West. There is a desperation in their ambitions for their child. They have done everything they can to ensure her success – picking the right school, advanced lessons in English, extra study sessions. She seems certain to win the scholarship that will take her to a new, more promising life far from Romania’s crime, corruption and economic stagnation.

But a day before the three-day final exam begins, something terrible happens. The daughter is assaulted on the way to school. She escapes the attempted rape but is traumatized and suffers a sprained wrist. The school officials decline to postpone the critical exams or even give her extra time to complete it. The crisis places her father in difficult situation: should he violate the standards of honesty and integrity by which he raised his daughter or should he reach into the pool of deal-making and corruption around them, to ensure she passes the test and escapes Romania’s broken system?

That moral dilemma is the heart of the drama and it also reveals details about the parents’ lives and their marriage as it harshly explores the difficulties of life in Romania. Unfortunately, the film takes awhile to let us know that, and sometimes seems unfocused and wandering. The assault is not the only obstacle to Dr. Aldea’s hopes for his daughter. She also has a low-achieving motorcycle-riding boyfriend who might distract her from her goals. Meanwhile, the police investigation of the attack, which several witnesses ignored, is not going well. At first, we are unsure what this drama is really about: The assault on the daughter? Crime in Romania? Corruption? Lack of economic opportunity? Coming of age? All play some role in the story but the parents’ ambitions for their daughter, the personal story under that, eventually emerge as the main point.

The acting is a highlight of this thoughtful drama, particularly Titieni as the father. The scenes between the father and daughter are believable and taut, but those with his depressed wife are the most heart-breaking. The doctor’s life is more complicated that it appears at first and compromise has been part of that , even while he has tried to hold on to some ethics.

Of course, the doctor has underlying motivations from his own life behind those hopes and plans for his daughter. Having returned to his native Romania after graduating medical school with hopes of making it better, he and his wife now feel that was a mistake, one they want their daughter to avoid. Of course, there are pitfalls in parents living out their ambitions through their children. The drama also delves into the dynamic of the couple’s marriage and their disappointments, personal and professional. In the process in life, the film explores the moral dilemma the father faces in possibly asking his daughter to violate the principle by which he raised her.

Apart from the attack on daughter and a few other moments, GRADUATION lacks the dramatic drive and gripping energy of the director’s early film. The film is a thoughtful mediation on moral choices but it is also rather rambling and low-key, often focused on quiet conversations, subtle scenes, and offering less-heated, more resigned social commentary. For those with the patience, GRADUATION does have something to say, on moral choices, diminished expectations in an Eastern European nation, parental hopes of children, and the urge to emigrate, among other things, but the low-key, less-focused approach may not keep all audiences totally engaged.

 

Review: POLICE, ADJECTIVE

POLICE, ADJECTIVE is one of those films we refer to as a slow burn, a movie that is more about what is percolating underneath than on the surface.  To note, not a whole lot happens on that surface, and the film rides that edge between tedium of interest with a certain level of threat of toppling over.  It never does, though, and, thanks in large part to the direction by Corneliu Porumboiu and the lead performance from Dragos Bucur, the film ends up being an intriguing study of the way one man’s world works even if he doesn’t fully understand it.

Bucur plays Cristi, a Romanian police officer set with the assignment of following a young man who may or may not be a drug dealer.  Cristi soon comes to his own conclusions as to the boy’s innocence, and his interests in another boy, the one who served as informant on the first boy, begin to rise.  Cristi begins following the second boy, never fully sure as to what he is going to find, but definite in the moral path he has chosen.  The authorities in charge of the investigation may have other ideas on Cristi’s beliefs.

The slow movement of the film’s pace isn’t necessarily given to a meticulous nature.  Porumboiu’s direction is solid to say the very least, and the gray, flushed out color in every shot brings the city setting to an almost lifeless level.  This heightens the sense of Cristi’s inactivity, the tedious task he is set with in standing on sidewalks and watching a group of teenagers from afar.  Porumboiu never pulls away from this, and the film very nearly suffers for it.  Even if we understand the point the director is making here, it doesn’t necessarily give way to intrigue in the narrative.

Even Cristi’s home life is flooded with dormancy, and, while Cristi’s wife, played by Irina Saulescu, views this as a contemplative state of being, Cristi seems bored and unmoved.  As he sits and eats dinner after a long day of skulking through the city streets, Cristi’s wife listens not once or twice but three times to a song about beauty in correlation.  Cristi doesn’t understand this, and no amount of explanation from her on what the song means to her will make him understand.  It isn’t that he is consciously thick-headed.  He is just a character who has difficulty seeing things any other way than what he knows of the world.

Cristi just touches on the surface of being a very tragic character, someone whose world and those in charge of it seem to be turning in on him without much he can do about it.  Bringing this leveled character to sympathetic life is no small feat, and it’s one Bucur pulls off in spades.  He appears in every scene, and most of them involve menial tasks that could very easily cause some actors to balk at the monotony of it all.  Bucur dives headlong into the role.  He never gives any insinuation that either he or Cristi is bored, and that goes a long way in keeping the same feeling from the audience.  Cristi has a job to do, even if that job at the present moment is sipping a cup of tea while looking distantly across an empty street.  Bucur has a job to do, keeping us interested in both Cristi and his job at hand.  Both end up doing just that.  You will be amazed at how much this actor does with so little.

And, in the end, that is what POLICE, ADJECTIVE is really all about, doing much with what little it has to offer.  There are deep-seeded meanings hidden throughout, some a little more heavy handed than others.  A finale involving the police chief and a dictionary might not be as exciting as a car chase through an airport, but it gets the job Porumboiu had at hand done.  Ultimately, the film is about understanding, maybe not knowing the answer to every question that comes across your way but understanding what that answer is.

In that way, POLICE, ADJECTIVE is much like A SERIOUS MAN, a film that probably handles the same, underlying message with a bit more fervor and, ultimately, a lot more interest.  As admirable and as eloquent a message as the one Porumboiu has to deliver here, the narrative and drive in his film is nearly non-existent.  You may find much interest in one man’s longing gaze at a world he doesn’t fully understand, but don’t expect much more in the way of intrigue and suspense than what is found in a casual saunter down a sidewalk.

Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars