It feels terribly funny today to say this, but before being the one thousand faces theatre actress today, Emilia Dobrin, Miki, was to a film actress... Give a search and you’ll find over twenty films in the filmography... And if you take a quick look squint on the YouTube Brother as well (as I did myself in search for something that I will tell you about below), you’ll find her as a blue fairy ... singing.
Yes, I have no doubts about my emotional memory: and Cinemagia does not lie (even though it includes mistakes, including two different films on the list of roles, when in fact it's the one and the same: Sick Animals/ 1970 and Among the Green Hills/ 1971 are actually one and the same film, a screening of Breban’s own novel, Sick Animals, under the title Among the Green Hills. If I am not mistaken, the film was nominated for the Cannes). As for me, I first noticed her in Mircea Muresan’s Blue Gates of the City, after a short story by Preda, also included in the eighth grade literature manual. They used to madly broadcast this (which wasn’t that bad, actually) every August 23; more and more hacked, to fit in the broadcasting time and to see less of Dan Nutu (since he fled to America). I, nevertheless, kept looking at Emilia Dobrin, of a charming beauty and a sort of Nouvelle Vague minimalist interpretation - something between shyness, shame and guilt - ... with always enchanted eyes. Then I sincerely trusted her in her role as an experimentalist doctor, caring and with gentle humour in Red Apples. That was also the film where I first heard of... Alexandru Tatos.
And I noted it very well, as Sequences followed, and this is a film that I know frame by frame; there’s DVD of this film in my head, even older than the invention of the videotape. In that film Miki first plays herself: a young, honest, bearing actress, increasingly irritated, increasingly exasperated, increasingly desperate, the sad and filthy circus of the hut party (in the Prospectus episode). For her later to play in the of shooting scene (Four Slaps), in which she, the actress, is professionally humiliated, frame by frame, playing over and over the same scene, the same line, while next to her, in the extras scenery, takes place, without her knowing it, the duel between the victim and the executioner (Geo Barton and Ion Vilcu, both in the most extraordinary roles of the Romanian film perhaps). If you have not seen the film and, therefore, the interlacing two dramas, the one of the actress, drenched to the bone, always returned from her way, in the movie stupid film with communists just being shot, and the one between Papasa and Georgescu, do not miss this meeting, you can purchase it on the internet. (Do not delude yourselves, on YouTube you can only find a tiny fragment with Dragos Pâslaru.)
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What did theatre directors do in those times? Not that she didn’t play enough with the Nottara, for years on end, but... she was not enough - and sufficiently consistent - challenged. I actually think that she (stupidly, I would say) seemed to them too beautiful to be distributed in something... complicated. They have no idea what they missed. Only recent years have brought to light the treasure of stage insight and intelligence she is hiding.
I was first left speechless when I saw The First Ladies by Werner Schwab. Directed by Sorin Militaru, the staggering acting recital given by Dorina Lazar, Emilia Dobrin and Coca Bloos was, at the time, a shock: I would have never thought of such a tour de force that Miki took (and still takes, the performance has a well-deserved long life) in Erna, mingling rapacious control, irony and self-irony, former queen whimsies and the crystalline sensitivity, called by memory, acid bitterness and dives in her own abyss…
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I didn’t get to see Dabija’s Once Upon a Time (Înşir’te mărgărite), I will die regretting it, but I know that in the re-reading of that fairy tale for adults today, Miki was a revelation again: “I discovered how Emilia Dobrin, with special energies, unjustly unexplored for years, really goes further ahead on the “avant-garde” path in The First Ladies at the Act Theatre. Every word, every gesture, every detail is under control, directed with a precisely outlined purpose, and does not abandon for a second the character’s disposition, not even when it comes to the foreground. And does everything with faith and intense pleasure.”(Marina Constantinscu, “What do the Grains Say?”, Romania Literara, no. 50/2003).
But Cheek to Cheek by Jonas Gadell, followed for me, staged by Afrim in 2006, where Miki reveals a magnetic stage presence, mysterious, smouldering and without hope, a sort of an old “wild duck”, in the company of Constantin Cojocaru. Doina Papp was actually right to point out that the performance was “particularly notable for the revelation called Emilia Dobrin, stunning by gentle tragicality”... What I saw there was that kind of acting that completely abates and fills me with delight: how, almost no support in anything but herself, the actress lived dispositions as ages, rejuvenating in hope and aging in pain and dejection, within a fraction of a second, bellow your eyes, amazed at the possibility of such a thing.
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Only to see, in Albee's Goat or Who is Sylvia?, about two years ago, another tour de force, this time one step away from the audience, in a strange tragic-comedy (directed by Alexandru Dabija). Directorially built specifically on the foundation of a pseudo-psychological realism (in the spirit of Stanislavski ), to create tension with the anomalous, delirious situation of the “marriage triangle”. It had already become very clear to me that Emilia Dobrin is an actress who thrives when given difficult stage tasks, to ask the not only of the emotional resources, but also of the intellectual ones, the thirst for knowledge. And yet, I could hardly have imagined that, seeing her in the role of a middle class wife cheated with goat, absolute abnormality can become more normal than the air we breathe. From daze to denial, fear the wild laughter, biting sarcasm to vulnerability, everything is in it. Once more, it was confirmed to me that “unpredictable” actors (like her) become more excellent in their performance, the stronger their partner is (in this case, as the entire audience knows, Marcel Iures). The art of acting also include a (tonic) touch of sportsmanship, and as soon as you recognize that, it becomes unforgettable.
What, you didn’t get to see the Goat…? That’s not possible... Make yourself a gift!
