Parents and children that never grew, Part I: First of All, Felicia
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to see the Romanian films of this decade from a more objective perspective, a lot of them will probably look more like historical documents.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. The reluctant critics of the so-called Romanian New Wave are once right for that matter: even if a Romanian film tells a story that could be easily translated into another culture, there is nevertheless in each film something really tangible, something like “how life was in Romania at the beginning of the century”, hence, recurrent themes like anger towards the Other, helplessness in the face of bureaucracy, ultimately, the imperative need to leave the country. More or less discretely, these films reflect a reality that surrounds both the young directors and the audiences. I don’t think, though, that those critics are right when they request certain aspects to be underlined and others omitted. But their arguments make you involuntary curious about the way a director or a screenwriter reflects in his new film this reality, which you ultimately share with them. The annoying fact about the otherwise excellent First of All, Felicia, written and directed by the first time directors Răzvan Rădulescu and Melissa de Raaf is that their background reality is equivalent to that of a news bulletin. First of All, Felicia, arguably the best film of the competition so far, has this major flaw: it shows a stereotypical face of the society; not better, not worse, but filled with nods towards the audience, with information that I already know, because I know it. I don’t want to be manipulated like this. I don’t want this reality made with small details that I can read in a satirical newspaper. The story begins a few hours before the departure of the main character, Felicia, for Holland, where she moved several years ago, and takes place on the way to the airport, at the airport and a few hours later. In half a day, still, we meet a paranoid taxi driver, scared by governmental chip implants and who seems to know all and nothing about the various frauds of the politicians, while later Felicia and her mother discuss the horrendous images placed on the cigarette packs. I don’t care about this reality, which is surely indented to be satirical, even if, to a certain points, cab drivers can resemble the one we meet in the film and even if Felicia, rarely visiting Romania, could very well notice the cigarette packs and want to discuss about them. But these conversations will not last until the next time I watch the film and ten years from now they will only remind me of something from the past. As a viewer, I’m interested more about the story, about what’s happening (and, more important, what happened once) between Felicia and her parents and, subsequently, between Felicia and her ex-husband, and I don’t want to be tricked with banal lines about things that I can recognize. True, when it comes to carefully giving clues about what’s happening, Rădulescu and de Raaf are at their best, both as screenwriters and directors, and Felicia’s final outburst really feels like a consequence of all the tensions and frustrations that are being accumulated in the film. Ozana Oancea is the best pick for Felicia, as she manages to balance in her performance a sense of dissimulation and a need for telling the truth once and for all. Still, there is a problem: she acts intensely in each and every situation, she acts everything, maybe because she was told to, maybe because it’s her way of understanding the character, but even when she receives a phone call, and phone calls are numerous and important for the story, she acts like she was facing the real character, she is never neutral or bored or secretive. In the ordinary life, people use to do this all the time, to laugh or make gestures while talking on the phone, unaware of the situation, but Ozana Oancea does it boldly, she wants us to see her relationship with her ex-husband and her kid. In a way, it’s likely to be this way, we understand from her affection that she lives entirely in Holland, that the real life is there, far from the burdensome relationship with her parents, there, where she is not somebody’s grown child. Still, there is at times a bit too much acting into an otherwise assured and fresh performance. We can ultimately admire the craft of the screenwriters, who manage to connect all the dots, leaving nothing aside, but their lack of sense for the background, understandable for de Raaf, who doesn’t know Romania that well, but inexcusable for the formidable screenwriter that Rădulescu is, makes First of All, Felicia an almost accomplished film, but with great chances to one of this year’s trophies.
First of All, Felicia, directed by Răzvan Radulescu & Melissa de Raaf
Exit Serbia: too little from the director Vladimir Paskaljevic
Devil’s Town has one of the most memorable scenes from the whole competition so far: at the very end, lots of white rabbits, escaped from a nearby warren, spread on the alleys and the lawns of a park. It’s the kind of bizarre, almost surreal image that you remember even if the film wasn’t at all great (and Devil’s Town definitely wasn’t), the kind of scene that you can feel it was in the director’s mind before shooting the first take. But the film has little to offer besides this scene. The Serbian director Vladimir Paskaljevic delivers a story filled mostly with human, cartoon-like sketches, instead of real characters, from businessmen to prostitutes, with all their little crazes and colorful kill-times. As a final touch of absurd, the whole imaginary town, as if it weren’t enough burdensome and manic, seems preoccupied with the tennis stars of the moment and seem to do little else besides watching tennis matches. There is, nevertheless, something promising about the way the script unveils how all the characters of the story are connected by kinship or by almost forgot events. Ultimately, this is a story about how suffocating and closed to the exterior a little town could be, and in this setup, you can believe everybody knows everybody, as it is equally plausible that some of the characters dream of leaving the city or regret coming back. In this little town, all the bizarre events are more likely to be preeminent, and Paskaljevic gathers a lot of comic material, just to attach it to some minor, almost irrelevant, at times even vulgar stories. Devil’s Town can be seen as an exercise in creating another, maybe more coherent story, but on its own, it fails on so many grounds, that you almost forget that this small, independent feature was probably made out of pure passion for film.
Devil’s Town, directed by Vladimir Paskaljevic
A friendship: Truffaut, Léaud and Godard
The French New Wave appears first of all, the way it’s presented in Emmanuel Laurent’s documentary, Two of the Wave, to have been quite a volatile movement. Some still argue that it wasn’t really a coherent group at all and that you cannot link different aesthetics like those of Godard, Resnais or Chabrol in the same paragraph. The film argues that, even if a French New Wave existed, it didn’t wait for the end of the decade to fade, at least in the perception of the French audiences. Still, it’s true that the film focuses mostly on the most preeminent “two of the wave”, Truffaut and Godard, occasionally reminding the viewer of disparate figures also associated with the movement. But this is mostly a film about the two directors that brought all the attention to the new French cinema in the late fifties; the beginning is comprised of a detailed retelling of the whole story, insisting on two different opinions about what the new French film was meant to be that appeared from the very beginning, even before the term “New Wave” was coined. On one hand, we have Truffaut’s declarations about film and sincerity, about the inner need of a director to make films that would fit his personality, on the other, we’re watching several interviews with the early Godard, which is, of course, the aesthete of the movement. As it follows the events of the mid-sixties, the solidarity between the French filmmakers and their increasingly different ideas about the purpose of cinema, Laurent’s film slowly develops into a meditation about the social meaning of art, a theme that never ceased to be discussed by modern aesthetics, but it’s reprised here because Truffaut and Godard are, towards the end of the sixties, examples of two entirely different positions. Godard is the one who addresses the filmmakers present at Cannes, in 1968, asking them to support the boycott of the festival and, in the meantime, accusing them of never being committed to the cause of the working class. Truffaut, on the other hand, speaks about art that refuses any political commitment and about the example of Cézanne. Somewhere in between, the biography of Jean-Pierre Léaud, who worked with both, but in different stages of their careeer. Besides its underlying questions, Two of the Wave has the great quality of being a visual lesson of cinema: each time we are told about a scene or, even better, a new technique used by the French film directors of the sixties, an example follows, making Two of the Wave one of the most enriching (and recommendable) experiences about cinema this year.
Two of the wave, directed by Emmanuel Laurent
Parents and children that never grew, Part II: Dogtooth
The unbelievable story of Dogtooth, we’ve already seen it filmed a few times: the parents who lock their children inside the house, fearing that the contact with the exterior can be harmful to them has been already been told by Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple in 1998, is featured, with a few mystical nuances, in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (there, the children freed watch naively the outside world and ask if this is the way the end of the world should look like) and is similar to El Castillo de la Pureza, a film made by the Mexican director Arturo Ripstein in 1973. Even the first part of Rushdie’s Shame has a similar story. But the thing that makes Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Dogtooth brilliant is, besides a meticulous direction and a sense for staged brutality, the underlining of the vulnerability of the characters. Of course, they’re supposed to be vulnerable, that’s what all these films are about. But the three teenagers in Dogtooth are somehow special because in the film the whole outside world has been bizarrely coded for them by their parents; hence the open ending, which, at a closer look, is not at all open. The clash between these codes and the “common” world, familiar to the viewer, makes one think how much of this “common” is, in the end, natural and not a matter of conventions. By far, the most impressive part of the film has something to do with the way the three youngsters interact with filmed images: first, their images, then, regular films, which they cannot identify as such, because they wouldn’t know what a film is. It’s easy to think about Haneke and his never-ending transgressions between reality and images of reality, but ultimately Dogtooth is more about the relationship between “natural” (i.e. primitive, without a shape, unorganized) and our reality, which has always been anything else but natural. In a way, Dogtooth is the equivalent of those stories about tribes careful not to photographed, because one might steal their soul, because it makes you feel how much your connection with the social and, ultimately, the art, is a matter of those who define them as such. Dogtooth is a film made out of pure fear that everything social is ultimately conventional.
Dogtooth, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
