Romania's thirst for realism

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"It's long. I feel foreign for that," said Romanian director, Christi Puiu, as he introduced his newest film, Aurora. Running for about three hours, Aurora is one of three Romanian films running in the official selection here.

Since 2001, when Puiu's first feature, Stuff and Dough, was accepted in the Directors' Fortnight, Romania has become an art house powerhouse with films that are often long, in which nothing much happens for a long time, and then, in the final reel, a great deal happens.

In the case of Aurora, the final 20 minutes involves a deadpan divorcee named Viorel (played by the director) whose anger with his former wife and her family lead him to commit a series of murders. In its way, it's a black comedy. Even when he makes his confession the police act as though they have better things to do. Mungiu says, in his director's statement that he tried "relentlessly to make a 'realistic' film, and tried to render the toxic climate reigning in post-Communist Bucharest as accurately as possible."

The other film here is a three-hour documentary called The Autobiography of Nicola Ceausescu, which tells the story of the dictatorship entirely through propaganda films. The film has no narration but simply shows the progress of Ceaucescu's increasingly disastrous cult of personality while his country fell further and further behind.

Ceausescu and his wife were executed on Christmas Day in 1989, after ruling for 15 years. Perhaps it would be over-reading things to find some relevance in the title of Radu Montean's new film, Tuesday, After Christmas, about a middle-class marriage falling apart during the holiday season. A banker, Paul, who has a wife and daughter and a mistress, who is a dentist. When Paul takes his daughter to the dentist and the two women meet, he decides he has to make a confession. and the film shifts gears: In one sustained scene,, she cross-examines, mocks, challenges and berates him, forces him out of his complacency.

What Montean wanted to capture, he says, is the "voyeuristic sensation that one might get from looking into people's houses, from walking into a couple's kitchen or bedroom."

The concern with the actual texture of life, even at its most tedious. Romanian cinema is also concerned with passage of time (even evident in such titles as 12:08 to Budapest or 4 months, three weeks and 2 days) and what Romanian critic, Andrei Gorzo, has called "a sense of duty toward reality." Filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu, director of 12:08 East of Bucharest, and last year's art house hit, Police, Adjective) also talks about "an obsession for reality and sincerity towards the story."

This thirst for realism makes sense when you think of a generation of filmmakers who were raised in a world dominated by the opposite, the world of propaganda films and television. If Romanian films sometimes run long, it's understandable. The filmmakers waited for a long time in silence.