Romanian Film's Crystalline Lens

AFI and National Gallery Will Screen Worldbeating Movies

Every once in a while, an art form will blaze so brilliantly in one particular place that you sense the presence of a grand conversation underneath it. Each artist seems in dialogue with his peers, each new work takes on coherence and depth in communion with the others. In the past decade, an interconnected group of young Romanian actors and directors have been astonishingly productive at this very high level, a burst of creativity that may someday be compared to the great age of the novel in 19th-century London, or with the efflorescence of abstract expressionism in New York a half century ago. What is happening today in Romanian moviemaking is that good.

Romanian actors and directors have been winning awards at film festivals for years now, and their works have been creeping onto American critics' top 10 lists. This year, it was a Romanian film, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," that won the Palme d'Or, the brass ring at Cannes. With that award comes new prominence not just for the film's director, Cristian Mungiu, but for his peers in the new Romanian cinema. The film will be screened tonight -- demand was so strong it sold out, but it has now been moved to a larger theater -- as part of the AFI Silver's European Union Film Showcase.

That is just the beginning of an extraordinary display of Romanian films in the coming weeks. Along with Mungiu's film, perhaps the best film ever made about abortion, AFI will also show "The Way I Spent the End of the World." And from Nov. 16 through the end of the year, the National Gallery of Art is presenting "Bucharest Stories," a survey of the past 10 years of Romanian film that amounts to an essential primer for anyone interested in contemporary cinema -- and a chastening indictment of triviality in our own American film culture.

The scope of these works is wide, the ambition deep. But many of them share a common sensibility, a passionately dispassionate view of reality. The magic and the illusion of life has been stripped away. The world is never background, never a stage set, but an intrusive, frustrating, chaotic thing, filled with accidents and mishap. Cigarette lighters don't work. Things fall out of cupboards. Cellphones drop calls. Paint peels, pipes burst, windows break, and clothes don't fit.

In 2004, the director Catalin Mitulescu won the top award at Cannes (for a short) with a 15-minute vignette called "Traffic," in which a man on a cellphone tries to balance work and family while surrounded by a blazing, blaring, bewildering cacophony of cars. You never quite know who he's talking to, the meeting he's late for or why an angry woman accosts him. But you've never sensed the frustration and stress of a traffic jam quite so powerfully, either.

"Traffic" condenses into a powerful statement a view of cinema that might be called Disenchanted Realism. The camera is naturally a liar, a seeker of beauty, a reducer of life, a glamorizer that infuses cinematic reality with an enchanted glow. "Traffic" disenchants reality, and the result is thrilling.

"There is really a belief in the long take, that hyper-realism can be effective filmically," says Todd Hitchcock, a programmer at AFI.

In the same category with "Traffic" are films such as Cristi Puiu's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," a brilliant, slow-paced, hyper-vigilant account of one man's tour through the Bucharest hospital system that astonished critics last year. So too "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," a heroically observed story of a woman's abortion during the final years of the Ceausescu regime, when the practice was illegal and the legal consequences brutal. And "The Paper Will Be Blue," about a young man's effort to desert his militia unit and join the revolution against Ceausescu on a night of street battles.

A small scene in "The Paper Will Be Blue" is breathtaking. In the midst of political bedlam, with guns blazing, rumors rampant, loyalties shifting and everyone suspect, a young man takes a moment to use the bathroom. Of course people still need to use the bathroom in war zones. But then the director, Radu Muntean, takes reality one step further. In the bathroom, the soldier opens the medicine chest and checks out the contents. Why? Perhaps it's a moment of looking behind the mirror, or searching out private reality while in the midst of a very public revolution. Perhaps it's a momentary retreat into simple curiosity, but it humanizes the man and makes his death all the more powerful when it comes, stupidly, accidentally and without meaning.

Shabbiness is essential to the truth of these films -- it is a way for the world to impinge on our senses -- but it isn't exploited. There's no sentimentality about poverty or suffering. Nationalism, which one might expect to crop up in an emergent national cinema, is virtually absent. In film after film, these young directors (most are in their 30s or early 40s) parse the trauma of their country in the rawest terms (and not without humor) yet never lapse into self-pity.

Romania is a poor country, one of the poorest in Europe. The 1989 revolution that ended with the flight, capture and execution of brutal dictator Nicolai Ceausescu did little to improve things at first, at least economically. A country that once contributed great artists and intellectuals to the mainstream of European cultural life was becoming exceptional, a broken place, a problem child of Europe.

To flourish, Romania would need to do some trenchant self-analysis. These films are part of that.