Charleston
Andrei Cretulescu (2017)
Late on the night of his forty-second birthday, a recently widowed and grieving man opens the door of his apartment to a somewhat younger man. The unexpected and unrecognised visitor explains that he was the lover of the other man’s wife. Alexandru (Serban Pavlu), the widower, immediately throws a punch at Sebastian (Radu Iacoban), laying him out cold. Sebastian spends the night on the living-room couch. Alexandru, as has been his wont since his wife Ioana died, sleeps in an upright chair rather than in the bed they used to share. He wakes the next morning to find Sebastian in the kitchen. He offers a black coffee to Alexandru – black because ‘I didn’t like the look of the milk’. That’s hardly surprising: even before Sebastian arrives, it’s clear that Alexandru isn’t looking after himself properly now that he’s alone. His shopping list comprises alcohol for himself and food for his cat.
The two men sit down to have a conversation though Sebastian does most of the talking. He enlarges on his affair with Alexandru’s wife, which went on for the last five months of her life, ‘more or less’. Ioana (Ana Ularu) was on her way to meet Sebastian when (in the short opening scene of Charleston) she hurried from a café, started to cross a road without looking and stepped into the path of an oncoming van. Sebastian does little to reduce Alexandru’s unsurprising hostility towards him. This bearer of further bad news does ask his host’s forgiveness but also admits that he’s come in the hope of getting, as it were, closer to Ioana – by seeing where she lived and things that belonged to her. Alexandru punches Sebastian again before leaving the apartment for a short while. He tells Sebastian to get out in the meantime and not come back. When Alexandru returns, Sebastian is still in situ.
My instant reaction to the outline for Charleston in the programme for this year’s Romanian Film Festival (RFF) at Curzon Soho was that it sounded interesting but more like a single-set two-hander for the theatre than a piece of cinema. Most of the film takes place indoors and is dominated by dialogue but the writer-director Andrei Cretulescu, whose first feature this is, keeps things moving, except when, as in the first main conversation between Alexandru and Sebastian, he wants to emphasise a static situation. I still wonder, though, if Charleston’s natural home isn’t the stage rather than the screen. It’s clear enough from the above that the scenario is somewhat unreal. It appears that Sebastian, after being knocked out on his arrival on the threshold, drifts straight into a good night’s sleep, once Alexandru has dragged him onto the couch. The following morning, why doesn’t Alexandru – evidently not averse from using physical force – eject Sebastian rather than trust him to let himself out? In a theatre, the audience may not be convinced by the relationships being described or the events taking place but we do accept, for the purposes of what we’re watching, that the performing space is a world. In this particular case, we’d probably accept that Sebastian has to take up residence in order for the play to proceed. It’s harder to do so in a film whose settings, acting and direction are naturalistic. When he refuses to leave at the first time of asking, Andrei Cretulescu treats Sebastian’s stay for the duration as a given, without explanation. He doesn’t supply anything that either forces Alexandru to put up with Sebastian or suggests the bereaved man is fired by the prospect of extracting bitter, vindictive pleasure from spending time with his late wife’s lover.
It might be argued that Charleston is an absurdist and/or black comedy and that these generic credentials are all Cretulescu needs by way of justification for his storyline. The dialogue certainly includes plenty of gallows humour and bone-dry wit; there’s the odd farcical turn of events. But the situation isn’t absurd (as distinct from improbable) in any meaningful sense. It might be more absurd if the two protagonists’ personalities were reversed – if Alexandru, rather than Sebastian, were the mild-mannered one, too nervous about giving offence to tell Ioana’s bit on the side to get lost. That at least would reinforce the adding-insult-to-injury theme and illustrate the ludicrous, imprisoning tyranny of staying polite and keeping up appearances come what may. Charleston is much more a black comedy – but in the current, loosely used meaning of that term. In other words, it alternates – you might say Three Billboards-style – between straight realistic drama and more humorously outlandish elements. The note on the RFF handout at Curzon Soho actually summarised this very well, without acknowledging any kind of conflict between the different strands: ‘The film’s versatility may be its biggest strength and probably its most appealing feature for the audience: some viewers may prefer the dramatic moments, while others will be more open to the comedy …’
This take-your-pick line ignores the viewer hoping for integration of the dramatic and the comic parts – for the jokes and farcical incidents to be grounded in some kind of truth derived from the particularities of the plot and the individuals involved. Charleston held my interest throughout – but thanks partly to growing puzzlement as to what Cretulescu was trying to do. (The film is dedicated, at the start of the closing credits, ‘to Ioana’ – which may or may not indicate an autobiographical element.) In the aftermath of his wife’s death, Alexandru, a screenwriter, has dropped out of whatever film project he was currently involved in; Sebastian says he works in a bookshop but wants to be a science fiction writer. Both men, for now, have time on their hands and Alexandru, in view of what Sebastian says he wants from the visit, decides to give him access to Ioana’s world.
He takes his guest to lunch with his parents-in-law (Ana Ciontea and Victor Rebengiuc). He plays Sebastian music of which Ioana was especially fond. They visit a cinema to watch her favourite film, her grave and, in the final part of the story, the coastal resort where Alexandru and Ioana spent their honeymoon and have holidayed every year since. During this climactic episode, Alexandru rails at Sebastian for his failure to react to any of these encounters with Ioana’s life. This is fair criticism – nor does Alexandru react much while the encounters are taking place. As they sit drinking together at the holiday venue, Sebastian expresses regret that he ever rang Alexandru’s doorbell – another very understandable remark which, like Alexandru’s complaint, exposes the hole at the heart of Cretulescu’s screenplay. We never get any sense of what either man is getting out of Alexandru’s programme of activities. These amount to a succession of sketches – some of them entertaining and individually effective – that don’t, however, make Alexandru or Sebastian feel apparently better, worse or different in the light of the horrifying and sudden loss of the woman they both loved.
The lead actors are good although in Serban Pavlu’s case deadpan and opacity are two sides of the same coin. They have to be, because Cretulescu’s script keeps under wraps how surprised Alexandru is by the revelation of Ioana’s extra-marital affair and how much it adds to his distress. In a late scene, Sebastian finds Alexandru sobbing and puts his arm tentatively round his shoulder; Alexandru accepts the embrace and continues to weep. The emotional release is a temporary relief for the viewer too but the older man resumes his poker face next morning. Alexandru is a nebulous and shallowly written character: Cretulescu locates him in the professional world of cinema chiefly by having him spout a few movie facts. Back in 2009, Radu Iacoban, then in his mid-twenties, gave a taking performance in the portmanteau film Tales from the Golden Age. Although IMDB lists plenty of work in the interim, this was the first time I’d seen him since. I was impressed again. Iacoban’s Sebastian is socially awkward and easily embarrassed. He also has a blend of self-effacing charm and covert stubbornness that makes it plausible that a relatively sophisticated woman might have found Sebastian attractive and that he might have embarked on (if not pursued far) his extraordinary intervention into Alexandru’s mourning.
Charleston is somewhat refreshing for what it isn’t. A more conventional treatment of the basic ingredients might have led to (a) Sebastian’s ruling the domestic roost or (b) Alexandru’s subjecting him to seriously rough treatment and humiliation or (c) sentimentally turning the two men into a bereaved Odd Couple. There’s no trace of (a) and a single threat of (b): when Alexandru returns from his outing to find Sebastian still in the apartment, he rubs his face in Ioana’s bed sheets, sprays him with her perfume, and throws tampons at him. (Charleston would be a more provocative piece of work if Cretulescu had shown Sebastian already exploring the bedroom before his host returned.) The film hints at (c) only when the men go shopping for groceries, find their credit cards rejected at the checkout, leave sheepishly, dart back into the supermarket to steal what they couldn’t pay for, and run off down the street together. I’ve not seen a great deal of modern Romanian cinema but I found it quite unusual too for sardonic comments on the state of the nation to be relegated here to incidental details – bit-part gangsters who make an unpopular local politican disappear, a dodgy builder and his mate, the bored, indifferent girl at the supermarket checkout.
While he and Sebastian are at the coast, Alexandru says one thing that sticks in the mind. ‘You’re the biggest idiot I’ve ever met,’ he tells Sebastian, ‘don’t ever change’. The implication that it’s somehow easier for Alexandru to accept that his wife was unfaithful with a laughing stock has a complexity that’s unusual in Charleston. Perhaps, though, Andrei Cretulescu simply included this as another amusing one-liner. His priority seems to be to deliver instant impact, whether genuinely affecting (Alexandru’s eventual breakdown and so on) or archly amusing. It’s characteristic of his approach that, after Alexandru punches Sebastian the second time, the latter – even though he’s meant to be a weed – reciprocates. This is so that they can have matching black eyes on which other characters can comment. Very occasionally, Cretulescu comes up with an image that’s intriguing as well as eye-catching. Most notable in this respect is a brief entr’acte, a sequence in which Sebastian and Alexandru stand side by side, facing the camera, and, as a piece of Ioana’s favourite music plays, make stiff, minimal dance movements to it – a unison that presents them as two of a kind more imaginatively than those black eyes do. More typical, though, is the wacky explanation of the film’s curious title. It’s a running together of the name of Charlton Heston, whom we learn is Sebastian’s favourite actor but definitely not Alexandru’s.
22 April 2018