The Opinions of a Moderate Man: Alexandru Solomon, Kapitalism – Our Improved Formula

Kapitalism – Our Improved Formula (Kapitalism - Reţeta noastră secretă) (2010)
Directed by Alexandru Solomon

Kapitalism – Our Improved Formula, Alexandru Solomon’s latest documentary, is so cautious with the very concept he uses for the title (capitalism, this time without the “k”), that it could be easily misunderstood by all sides involved: the journalists will think Kapitalism is too „soft”, the partisans of capitalism will find it too „harsh” (maybe even one-sided), eventually the leftists will be concerned with it being too neutral, and so on. No doubt, one of the first projects that tries to understand how Romania evolved economically in the last 20 years should raise some serious expectations. Since not many have seen the similar Apparatchiks and Businessmen, made by Stan Neumann a couple of years ago and since Kapitalism – Our Improved Formula had a proper release and was expected by an eager media, in a way, Solomon’s documentary is the first film to address the problem of capitalism in post-Communist Romania on such a huge scale. No wonder that the Romanian director was equally brave (too choose such a subject) and circumspect (in order to establish a distance between him and the subject/ subjects). But that doesn’t mean that the film doesn’t come with his views concerning the facts; on the contrary, Kapitalism has mostly a bitter, disappointed tone. In a certain way, the Romanian uprising of 1989 was useless, since a fictionally resurrected dictator Ceauşescu seems to like how the things are going nowadays in Romania, towards the end of the film; it’s the documentary equivalent of a feature film in which the evil character laughs pleased in the last frame. Kapitalism – Our Improved Formula is, first of all, a satire of the Romanian society; irony and sarcasm are to be found everywhere, except for the part of the interviews. Rarely does Alexandru Solomon ask something inconvenient while he’s interviewing controversial figures as Dan Voiculescu, Dinu Patriciu, George Copos sau Ioan Niculae. For most of the time, the only incriminatory moments are those animated video clips; only in them, Solomon shows how public goods are being transformed into private income, without accusing anyone in particular (there is, anyhow, a clip involving Dinu Patriciu). While interviewing, he’s invisible and equally not hostile. Of course, there is a certain meaning in not being involved in the picture, as Solomon eloquently explains in an interview how he doesn’t want to be a character in his own documentary, this being the reason why he deleted scenes that were involving him, waiting in vain for certain meetings scheduled for filming. The problem is that in the animated sequences, Solomon summarizes some of the accusations that appeared in the newspapers in the last few years, creating expectations for the viewers– will those accusations be discussed or not? Unfortunately, the director doesn’t ask those questions. He prefers instead to sum up particular moments of strangeness, as the businessmen talk about themselves. Clearly, Solomon’s film in not about the true face of the Romanian capitalism (if there is one), but about the peculiar lives of the Romanian capitalists.

An important thesis of the film is that a significant number of those that made their fortune in the first decade after the fall of communism in Romania were a part of the communist establishment themselves prior to Ceauşescu’s execution. The fact that this is “our” (i.e. Romania’s) “improved formula” of the capitalism is merely rhetoric, since one of the major hypothesis concerning the Eastern and Central post-communist Europe is that a “nomenklatura capitalism” has developed almost everywhere after the end of communism, from Poland to Russia and even China. It’s a pity that Kapitalism doesn’t draw any parallels to similar cases, focusing only on the Romanian case. Instead of just a single statistics, showing a Romania that has the lowest GDP in Europe, but the highest number of millionaires, a wider analysis would have been more effective in depicting the last 20 years, not for the sake of getting the numbers right or for creating the false impression that these events are somehow “normal” (since they aren’t), but for avoiding a possibly fatalistic interpretation of the facts (“oh, the things that happened to us…”). Since Alexandru Solomon manages to edit a good deal of “real moments” taken from the life of Romanian entrepreneurs, creating an intriguing puzzle of the present, a more precise depiction of the historical processes would have balanced perfectly his approach. Nevertheless, Solomon manages somehow to capture some of the most comically surreal scenes in recent Romanian documentary, due to the fact that his “characters” forget that they are recorded and engage freely into conversation; these scenes added, you have a spectacular panorama of Romania’s richest men. Even if you might not get the kind of polemical documentary you could have expected, Kapitalism – Our Improved Formula is an accomplished depiction of the human personality. It’s clear that Alexandru Solomon doesn’t want to be a theoretician of the politics, nor would he have some hidden political agenda; for him, capitalism isn’t a bad thing in itself; what he surely wants to prove is how spectacular and kitsch can be, in the same time, a picture that includes the various figures of recent Romanian entrepreneurs; add scene to scene and you almost have a comedy of manners; this “kapitalism”, suspected of fraud and ridicule, is Solomon’s target, and his art of capturing the various moments of exces and combining them makes you forget his imprecisions.