In 2001, thirty four year old Romanian Cristi Puiu made his
directorial debut feature Stuff and Dough under a shoe-string budget. It was a
road movie with distinct political undertones, pertaining to post-Ceausescu
dictatorship (between 1965 and 1989) era in Romania. The movie also brims with dead pan
comedy. Cristi Puiu mentions how watching Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law (1986)
happened to be a key thing in shaping his cinematic language. Stuff and Dough
is now widely regarded as the starting point of the fascinating Romanian New
Wave. The wave surged with Puiu’s Un Certain Regard winner The Death of
Lazarescu and reached higher visibility with Cristian Mungiu’s harrowing
abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007), which won the prestigious
Palme d’Or award. These Romanian movies took the ‘cinema verite’ style,
avoiding forced melodrama, and full of tight composition and masterful long
takes. The film-makers drew us to take in the non-event existence of the
Romanian public, while gradually diffusing layers of subtleties. Like any other
New Waves of cinema, the Romanian one was anticipated to have reached its
saturation point at the start of this decade. Yet, Romanian cinema continues to
make waves in the international arena. Last year, two masterly, complex dramas
– from Cristian Mungiu (The Graduation) and Cristi Puiu (Sieranevada), screened
at Cannes Film Festival – received glowing reviews and found a place in many
critics’ top film lists of the year.
Corneliu Porumobiu was a very important film-maker of the
Romanian New Wave whose thematic spectrum widened & deepened the
sociopolitical perspectives. As Puiu continued to do narrative experiments within
the rigid visual style, and Mungiu dealt with ferocious subjects, Porumboiu
perfected his visual and thematic reflections. Porumboiu has metamorphosed to
be the most philosophical film-maker of the new wave (Radu Muntean was another
central figure of the new wave, who followed different styles and explored new
themes; Radu Jude, Crisitian Nemescu and Catalin Mitulescu are also my favorite directors
of the new wave). Like Puiu and Mungiu, Porumboiu also received coveted awards
in the international film festivals (won Camera d’Or at Cannes for best debut
feature -- for 12:08 East of Bucharest and Un Certain Regard for Police,
Adjective). Porumboiu’s movies offer many surprisingly rich insights, most of which
could only be gleaned in re-watches. Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu’s works,
despite the subdued visual tone, passes along blistering emotions to create some dramatic impact. Compared to those, Porumboiu films are like hushed-up poetry.
So you need certain time to fully assimilate his seemingly simple narrative.
And gradually, you could peel off the surface and blithely stroll across the
subtle layers of Porumboiu’s visual poetry.
One of the primary themes of Romanian New Wave is to show
how the traces of old apathetic, corrupted bureaucratic machinery are still embedded
in the nation’s consciousness. So, Porumboiu and other film-makers never
approach the 1989 revolution with adoration. They just treat it as a point
where a long transition commenced. Amidst the Romanian film-makers, Porumboiu
incisively depicts this transitional state. His films mostly capture central
character’s physical movements in vivid details (from a distance that isn’t too
far or too close). Literally and figuratively, the characters go through
transition. However, their movements are blocked at a stage and the individual
is forced to stay within the boundaries of faulty system. The characters’
desire for security or better life gets lost in the blandly
colored rooms of bureaucratic offices (or even amongst the dictionaries and law
books). Immense focus is given to observe the non-events (like characters
walking one end of the street to another). The non-events marvelously join
together to pass off the feeling of wasted time and absurd, alienated
atmosphere.
Corneliu Porumboiu was 14 years old during the 1989
revolution which toppled Ceausescu’s communist dictatorship. In an interview
(to Brooklyn magazine, Mr. Porumboiu says that communists came into Romania at
a time when the country didn’t pass through consciousness, beliefs, and ideas
like in western society. He states that their nation was somewhere between
industrialization period and middle ages in the late 1940s. Communism only
added more fake layers to the already empty ideals. The director’s filmography
repeatedly strips off these natural-looking fake layers. The fascinating
quality is that while subtly stripping off this fakery, Mr. Porumboiu never
pushes us to take a judgmental stand. The characters remain as humans, cloaked
under different flaws.
Director Corneliu Porumboiu
studied management before pursuing film-studies at Bucharest’s I.L. Carnegie
University. In 2002, he made his first short film titled Gone with the Wine.
The film tracks down the lives of alcoholic bittersweet characters, living in
demoralizing, decrepit surroundings. He followed it with couple more short
films – A Trip to the City and Liviu’s Dream. These early works received
international acclaim in the short film festivals. Particularly, Liviu’s Dream
gathered lot of attention and it happens to be the darkest work of the
director, till date. Starting from 2006,
Mr. Corneliu Porumboiu has made four meditative feature films and one
spectacular documentary The Second Game.
12:08 East of Bucharest (2006)
12:08 east of Bucharest opens with the image of a glistening
Christmas tree amidst the concrete jungle in an empty Stalinist town square. It
is early morning on 22 Dec. 2005. It’s the 16th anniversary of the
Romanian revolution that’s supposed to have fully shattered the devious
communist regime. A local TV host comes up with an idea for a talk show: "Did
the people of the small town participated in the revolution?" What ensues a
superb dry comedy that establishes how nothing has changed. It shows how a
society with feeble societal values will forever be caught in the devious cycle
of history, repeating the mistakes of past. Beneath the funny layers, Mr.
Porumboiu questions the relevance of a alleged glorious time-stamp when people
are rendered impassive by the oppressive system.
Police, Adjective (2009)
The word ‘police’ is used in adjective form to either
denote police procedural where mysteries are solved through detective’s
ingenuity or to address a police state. In that manner, Porumboiu’s film is a
procedural, but not the regular gun-pulling, adrenaline-pumping kind. What we
see is a policeman following a quotidian surveillance ‘procedure’ to report
back to emotionless officers in drab buildings. While a usual climatic showdown
in a procedural is marked by gunfights, in Police, Adjective a superior officer
uses a intimidating dictionary as the weapon; and the scene, unfurls in a
static camera shot is more intense than a gunfight. The film is about the
manipulative language, used to oppress and keep the people inline. The movies
have offered me new, rich insights in the re-watches. Police, Adjective is my
favorite among Corneliu Porumboiu’s filmography.
When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013)
Despite a long title, the movie has a deceptively simple
plot-line: a director negotiates with his lead actress to persuade her to do
nude scene. The only visible complicated knot is that the director is
romantically involved with the actress. But as expected there are more layers
to it and Porumboiu’s wry sense of humor stops the meta-exercise from becoming
an academic lecture. The film also becomes meta-literal with a lengthy scene of
an endoscopy; may be to reflect the experience of viewers who would hate the
pedantic tone of narrative. Unlike the previous two films, Metabolism totally
neglects a narrative form to be a clever, experimental exercise.
The Second Game (2014)
In this documentary, director Corneliu and his father Adrian
Porumboiu bond over a recorded football game which happened in Dec. 3, 1988.
Adrian served as a referee for that match (played in a astounding snow-drenched
field). This seemingly boring, obscure sports footage watching documentary does
reveals the complex implications. The Second Game is the most experimental work
among the director’s works, which could a majority of viewers to declare it
tedious experience. But, I felt that this is yet another intelligent work,
reviewing different things from father-son relationship to sports under
communism to antique video technology.
The Treasure aka Comoara (2015)
The Treasure is the tale of two men searching for a supposed
buried treasure in the ancestor’s abandoned house – pre-communist era loot. Corneliu
Porumboiu was involved with a friend to shoot a documentary about the people
who had buried their precious things when communists took over the power
(communists nationalized all the properties). The story of family treasure is
common urban legend in Romania. But, the documentary stopped at half-stage, the
director used the subject matter for fiction. As usual the droll humor is derived from the
dry functionality of the nation’s bureaucratic and legalistic system. Simple
elements like a Robin Hood story and the visual composition of a garden (where
the treasure is supposed to be buried) contemplates on the unsolved problems
between individual and state.
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