romanian film Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Romania is still an inexpensive place to film a horror movie (just ask Charles Band, Elvira or Bruce Campbell), as well as place to stage more prestigious work; it has doubled for the Appalachians in Cold Mountain, and for India in the upcoming Youth Without Youth by Francis Ford Coppola. Their native film industry is far less known in the US. According to the Pacific Film Archives' Jason Sanders, Romania only makes six films a year. They're doing something right, or at least the Cannes Film Festival thinks so: Romanian films have won two Un Certain Regard awards, one Camera d'Or, and one Palme d'Or in the last three years.

At the Archives at UC Berkeley -- relatively central to the seven million residents of the San Francisco Bay Area -- the PFA is assembling a six-night program of Romanian films. If they have anything in common, it's telling about the trauma of the almost science-fiction evil of the Ceausescu dictatorship, and the tale of his hideo-comic downfall on Dec 22, 1989. The Paper Will Be Blue by Radu Muntean (Dec 2) stages the fear and excitement of the revolution in Romania as an urbane thriller; the Scorsese/Wim Wenders executive-produced The Way I Spent the End of the World (above) by Catalin Mitulescu (Nov 3) takes a more impressionistic, nostalgic approach.

Also making its California debut on Nov. 3 is California Dreamin' (Endless). It isn't called Endless because of a 155 minute running time, but rather because the director Cristian Nemescu died before the final edit. Armand Assante, recently the best part of American Gangster, if you ask me, plays a NATO Army Captain immobilized in a one-horse town by bureaucrats and hustlers. The Great Communist Bank Robbery (2004, Nov 25) concerns a really memorable Communist atrocity. After a 1959 bank robbery, the six who were arrested (guilty or not) were made to act in a reenactment film designed to show the Romanians that crime didn't pay; they were executed afterwards. Director Alexandru Solomon investigates this lost bit of history. Occident (Nov 17) is the first film by director Cristian Mungiu, whose still unreleased in our area 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days copped the Palme D'Or at Cannes 2007. And a series of short films on Nov 25 includes early work by Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a Cannes winner in '05), and Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest, Camera d'Or winner 2006). Pretty soon you'll be able to have a quick answer to the question, "What's your favorite Romanian film?"

A few years ago, a magazine pondered the question "What is the worst country in the world?" Just being an aggressive dictatorship wasn't enough to make the list. One of the key questions used to determine which country made the cut was "If you have a medical emergency in Country X, will an ambulance be available to pick you up?" The importance that people place on health care, and the gut reaction they have when its not provided in a timely, professional way, is a huge subject that's not often dealt with in fiction films. After watching Cristi Puiu's latest film, you may develop a whole new appreciation for America's crappy system. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu begins in the kitchen of a filthy, newspaper-strewn apartment in dilapidated Bucharest, with Mr. Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) nervously dialing for an ambulance. He informs the person on the other end of the phone that he has had a severe headache for four days, which can't be a good sign. Instead of sending out the ambulance immediately, however, they decide to quiz him to make sure he's on the level.

Do they know him to be a hypochondriac with a history of crying wolf? Can they tell that he has had too much to drink tonight? Or is this just how things are done in a resource-strapped society? It's unclear, but the phone call does not end reassuringly. Not convinced that the ambulance will even show up, Lazarescu decides to impose on his neighbors in the apartment down the hall for medicine. They know him to be an amiable drunk and hardly take his pleas seriously, until he throws up ropes of blood on their carpet. The next two hours of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu consist of a rainy blur of ambulance lights and street lights, and endless cross-talk between people trying to get a rapidly failing man to where he needs to be. Needless to say, Lazarescu is not a lucky man, and his luck on the night in question is horrendous. Lazarescu's emergency coincides with a local bus crash that fills every regional emergency room with trauma patients. Anyone who has ever been forced to wait for emergency room care will be gripping the edge of their seats during the scene where we see a physician stop the parademics in the parking lot from unloading Lazarescu.