Movie

Certainly, in this year’s competition there were plenty of interesting directors, but lesser overall impressive films. Not they were bad: just two or three of them seemed embarrassing: Devil’s Town for sure, Bel age, arguably. Mostly, there were films made for different kind of audiences, directed idiosyncratic by promising new names of European cinema (and not only European, if we think about Anocha Suwichakornpong)...

Somehow, Aurora was a bit too strong, too ambiguous, and too dark to let you watch another film for the next 24 hours. When compared to it, Rdau Muntean’s fourth film, Tuesday, after Christmas, feels less intense and less challenging, even if there is word of mouth that it’s Muntean best film in years. It may be so: nothing about Tuesday, after Christmas feels useless, added for the hell of it; on the contrary, when the final scene fades, you have the feeling that it can’t be just that.

On the night of Aurora’s premiere at Cluj, Cristi Puiu excused himself for coming at his first Romanian screening dressed casual; there is a very popular joke about it since then, which cleverly assumes that what Puiu should have worn wasn’t a tuxedo, but the clothes he wears most of the time as Viorel, the main character in his third film, Aurora.

It’s been three days since the first screenings at the Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) and the program looks rather balanced: for each film shown in the official competition, there is somewhere another screening that would likely make you forget about the twelve fresh films competing for the Transilvania Trophy. Four of the twelve were already screened: Nothing Personal, A Rational Solution, R and Reverse.

Among the many spectacular gestures of Andy Warhol, his theatrical visions of rock’n’roll are less documented. As the actual manager of The Velvet Underground, he had the unusual (back then, at least) idea to project images over the performances of Lou Reed and John Cale’s band. The performers were becoming merely misty shapes; what was left was the mix of images and music.

Ten, maybe twenty years from now, when we would be able to see the Romanian films of this decade from a more objective perspective, a lot of them will probably look more like historical documents. Then, we will be less interested by the stories (stories that we would already know) and more interested by what those films have to say about the long gone times.

Kornél Mudruczó is one of those directors who know a great deal about the art of making an austere film, giving you the minimum amount of information you need to understand the story so far. Delta, one of his most appreciated films, knew exactly how to be exasperating in this aspect, without losing the beauty of the film; Tender Son, on the other hand, screened at TIFF right after its premiere at Cannes this year...

As usual, I didn’t see the movie that won the Palme d'Or, or better said, I went out of the hall, with the clear suspicion that it will be the one, I stayed for two or three difficult to watch films just because I suspected that they will the selected one (Inarritu's Biutiful, the Ukrainian My Joy / Schastye Moe and the Hungarian Frankenstein – A Tender Son), so I missed the reason Uncle Boonmee relives his past lives.

Metropolis feels like a film made to test your attachment to the classics. You can either love it or hate it, and sometimes you can feel you understand it. A film of monstrous ambitions, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has a whole history of being misunderstood by critics. At the time of his premiere, it was considered socialist or even retrograde; after the Second World War, an influent film critic labeled it Nazi.

The fact that Park Chan-wook is among Quentin Tarantino’s favorite directors might give us a clue about him: he might be also an ironist. Actually, things are a bit more complicated than that. Although irony can be traced in Park Chan-wook’s work, his tales imply something more than a sense of the spectacular: they are, even if you could miss it at first sight, moral tales.