An auteur in search of a character: Cristi Puiu’s Aurora
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. And it’s not just for the show; for Puiu, it would have been the simplest way to say, “Viorel, c’est moi” or to underline what Aurora really was: a study in psychology and pathological behavior. Probably not a very consistent one, since, as a director, Puiu treats his character from a constant distance, while as a screentwriter, he does very little in the end to make things any clearer; as a viewer of the film, I feel that I understand Viorel even less after the questioning at the police station than I could understand him during the endless hours I’ve been watching him do things. True, after the final scene of the police station, I know more about Viorel’s victims, but his motivations are, on the other hand, getting more obscure than before; it could be the separation from his wife, as he admits, and we could figure this out even earlier in the film, in a scene where he says to the people that are moving the stuff out of his apartment “don’t touch the things from the other half of the room”; it’s clear that he’s in the middle of a divorce, but that’s he’s equally a very rational character, inclined to rational, (maybe too) abstract thinking, as he thinks he could separate so geometrically his goods from his wife’s. Viorel’s inner thoughts are systematically eluded in the film, as he is more of a taciturn, listening most of the time. In First of all, Felicia, the film made by Răzvan Rădulescu, screenwriter for all Cristi Puiu’s previous films, we could see the same kind of character, reluctant to expressing herself, only to burst later into a cascade of emotions; we aren’t aware for a long time what’s happening with Felicia, but in the end we could see why she’s been silent for the whole time. The character from Puiu’s own script, Aurora, is closer to those characters of the minimalist prose, so popular after the World War II, than to the filmic structure of Felicia… It’s enough to take a look at Peter Handke’s The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty, published in 1970 and made into a film by Wim Wenders in the subsequent year. In the novel, as in the film, there is an almost maniacal attention to facts only, no thoughts, no stream of consciousness. The reality is simple and equals what’s happening before one’s eyes; Wim Wenders’ The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty is equally meticulous in not giving any plausible reasons for the inexplicable murder that takes place at the beginning of the film. Aurora is far from being the same film as The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty, but this urge of keeping the facts “clean” of outer considerations is similar. Nevertheless, Puiu insisted after the screening on the fact that he put in the script all the reasons for Viorel’s murders; as all that’s given to us is the way Viorel interacts with other people (work mates, the mother, the mother’s lover, and so on), we should be aware that the reasons for his murders are supposed to be inherent in his mental structure and the way he perceives the world. The trick is, as we watch the film for the first time, we are unaware of how carefully we should collect each detail, as it occurs onscreen. After the credits, we could try to remember, as complete as possible, what our main character said and when, but during the first time we see it, I doubt that anyone’s got anything in mind else than figuring out what the character has on its mind. This is merely due to the fact that the director makes it hard for his audience to guess what’s happening, obscuring as much as possible Vasile’s action: the moment he receives the bullets, early in the film, he has the back turned to the camera; what he’s doing, it’s really a mystery, until later in the film, when we would be aware of the black bag he’s carrying everywhere with him and of what’s in it. Ultimately, why Vasile is choosing those people as his victims, it’s a matter of lasting mystery, as the main character gives us another (possibly false) explanation, when he declares he’s into the terminal phase of a disease. But the main point about Aurora is that it is made out of several distinct situations, supposedly created by Puiu in order to show us how his Vasile would react. It’s from these situations that we should judge how the murderer is like, with the sole mention that the version presented at Cannes and, subsequently, at TIFF, three hours long, cut from a nearly monstrous version of five hours, contains probably the essential situations imagined by Puiu and the essential fact that we should know about the murderer’s personality. In a way, Puiu made, with his three hours cut, a succinct version of his film. Arguably, because lots of the scenes were remade, to fit the three hours length, Puiu’s style has become more alert; several times, he uses short scenes, as we are not escorting the character through his whole night in real time, as in some of the scenes in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu. Even if Aurora is a long film and it feels ample, it is nevertheless efficient; his length has more to do with the huge quantity of information it carries. You almost feel like Puiu, left to write his own script, works more like a novelist than a screenwriter, adding up details, seeing the picture from different angles, trying to reflect as closely as possible the complexity of a human personality. The Romanian journalist Cristian Tudor Popescu, in a review of the film, was addressing the fact that Vasile is one of the first characters of its kind in Romanian cinema, as the complex psychopath. But the technique used by Puiu in order to define him makes him something even more, one of the first characters of the 21st century to be created in terms of realism, but the kind of realism that was popular in the novels of the late 19th century, and not its cinematic equivalents of the 20th century.
Aurora, directed by Cristi Puiu
A “remake”: Last Conversation
Everything was already tried, probably, in terms of concept, or so they say. Still, what’s your excuse as a director and as an artist for taking a famous concept and update it into a present version, that you claim it’s yours? Noud Heerkens in his Last Conversation does that, mixing a concept and a relatively known technique, re-making one of the famous films of the forties. In 1932, Cocteau was writing a play, „The Human Voice”, later adapted by Rossellini into a film starring Anna Magnani (1948): in it, a woman, lonely in her room, was addressing her final words to the man she loved by telephone; later, Poulenc would make an opera after the monologue created by Cocteau. In 2009, Heerkens takes this concept, moves it into another enclosed space, a car, and changes the lines. All the conversation is filmed with several cameras, diffused inside the car or attached to it on the outside, alternating the shots, a technique relatively known since Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. The only reason to watch this movie, eventually, and not just rent a copy of Rossellini’s film, is the range of emotions displayed by the main character, her long (and at times, dull) monologue; in Last Conversation, the main and only part is played by Johanna ter Steege; the movie buffs will probably remember her from the obscure and equally wonderful film of the eighties, The Vanishing (of course, the original Dutch version, in original Spoorloos).
Last Conversation, directed by Noud Heerkens
