Green Moon (Luna verde) (2010)
Directed by Alexa Visarion
When it came to the style of the Romanian film When I Want to Whistle, I Whistle, who recently has been awarded two prestigious prizes at the Berlin Film Festival, film critics almost unanimously agreed about one particular flaw: the shaky camera was endlessly following the main character through the prison, sometimes for no particular reason at all. Seeing Alexa Visarion’s latest film, Green Moon, you can see comparatively how effective this kind of approach may be, even if it wouldn’t always look good onscreen. One can always argue that following a certain character while he/ she wasn’t doing anything important for the plot in particular may be a total waste of film, and one could be right for that matter. Nevertheless, if you think about various real-time scenes at the beginning of some important Romanian movies (the camera following the main character inside and outside the apartment in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu or Otilia walking on the corridors of the house in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or the prolonged chase in Police, Adjective), all those depictions of the everyday routine are relevant, especially when compared to films that do exactly the opposite, efficiently assembling significant scenes to other equally significant ones. Green Moon is precisely this kind of film. His script, written by the director himself with an important contribution from one of his students, Iris Spiridon, focuses on a few important moments in the biography of a bunch of characters who will incidentally meet later in the film somewhere on the road between Bucharest and Braşov. Even if the plot involves quite a few minor characters, whose function in the story is not always clear (a friend in a wheelchair, an old man drinking in a restaurant, a piano player at a party, a theater director), I doubt that they aren’t conceived with an eye for the broader meaning of the fiction; at least, that’s what Alexa Visarion, in his charming and effusive way, is implying when he presents his latest film as a quest for meaning, which makes all the characters in the story accessories in that quest. The plot is quite simple, though the director prefers a rather intricate way of revealing it: a couple of friends, on the way to Braşov for the opening night of a play, are about to collide into another vehicle, whose driver, a possessive and choleric young man, brings back to Bucharest his little sister, who recently ran away for meeting her boyfriend, by coincidence, the actor having the main part in the play that is being performed later in the evening. Under the layers of sensationalism and drama, the point about all these young characters is that they’re in the early years of their adult life. Răzvan, one of the main characters, is an artist and an art collector, but we are hardly being told what the others do; the script is anyway much more interested in what shapes the young characters at their age: (mostly) music, movies and books. It’s not an accident that one of the many conversations is about taste, and about shaping one’s taste, while a long dialogue features a painting and the meaning Răzvan believes the painting has. But, while the characters talk a lot about films and music videos and paintings, we hardly see or hear anything else about them. In a isolated scene, at the beginning of the film, the possessive brother is being followed by the camera as he walks across rooms of his own apartment; otherwise, the mundane reality of all these characters is permanently eluded, as if their artistic preferences or their lines filled with allusions to literature would be the only things that mattered. This is why these ethereal presences seem strange to me, as a viewer, even after the film has ended, and I guess anyone would prefer characters that are more connected to reality, rather than being a type or a sketch of a mundane personality. This is why a walk into a prison can be more convincing than a ride with improper, larger than life characters.
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Nevertheless, it doesn’t help if one just tries to get from a certain film exactly what one got from another, and clearly the veteran director Alexa Visarion doesn’t match the stylistic approach of, let’s say, Cristi Puiu or Florin Şerban. It would be as useless to try and add a couple of minutes, documenting the mundane lives of the characters, just for the sake of it; it still would feel that these characters lack something “real”, because of the dialogues. The dialogues make the characters of Green Moon maybe interesting, surely sophisticated, but lacking a certain quality that would make them familiar to the audiences. As they appear, they are as complex and irritating as some of the characters of the “existentialist” Romanian novels of the thirties were, floating above realities, talking about art. How can you relate to a scene where Răzvan explains his choice in acquiring a painting by a famous Romanian artist just because the painter used “all the colors of the rainbow”, besides irony? Apart from that, it becomes clear as the plot unfolds that some of the characters are very much similar in taste, betraying the creative mind that invented them: one of Răzvan’s friends recalls reading one of Salinger’s stories, “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes”, the day after Răzvan’s mother coincidentally tells him the famous riddle from another Salinger story, “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor”. If the whole situation suits perfectly Maia Morgenstern’s character, the childish mother, managing to draw a memorable character from just a few lines, the notable coincidence only underlines the manufactured character of the film. The world that the characters live in is surely more close to the world of youth as Alexa Visarion would want it to be nowadays, with talks about books (even the jealous brother reads, but accordingly: Osho), with idealism and way too many common musical preferences.
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Green Moon has in its crew at least two important names of the Romanian cinema of the 70s and the 80s. One of them is Alexa Visarion himself, while the other is the DP Florin Mihăilescu, who has been a key figure of the Romanian photography and has shot important films like Sequences (Secvenţe) or Jacob (Iacob). This is why it’s so strange that the actual collaboration of these two prestigious names resulted in such a eclectic film. The way the director combines the shots is sometimes at best bizarre: filming a meeting between two friends in a café, he alternate close-ups with images of the woman at the counter and with exterior shots through the window pane, with the faces of the two friends almost indistinguishable. Similarly, a conversation inside the car is followed by a long, advertising-like shot from the outside, while the conversation never stops. All these shots seem to follow an unknown logic, since the film is never seems to adopt a coherent point of view from which the story is told. Instead, the director seems eager to experiment with distances and angles, not for the best results, as beautifully photographed scenes are abruptly interrupted by angles that don’t always fit. Obviously, Green Moon is supposed to be equally dynamic and mysterious, but the 80 minutes of the film are more eloquent for the director’s quest for a style that would encapsulate the contemporary story he is trying to tell, a clean, high style, and one that would be different from the style for which the younger Romanian directors are now famous. It’s a shame that this quest doesn’t live up to these high expectations, since Romanian cinema needs today more than ever a proper and actual depiction of the contemporary youth, and one movie per decade (Boogie) is certainly not enough.
