Cristi Puiu (2010)
Cristi Puiu’s new film had its British premiere at the London Film Festival screening I went to, in the Vue multiplex in Leicester Square. Most of the seats had already gone when I booked (nearly three weeks in advance) so I was puzzled when, only a few minutes before Aurora was due to start, the place was less than half full. Puzzlement turned to astonishment when the remaining audience arrived, some just before but most after the lights had gone down – laden with drinks and popcorn and even bags of shopping. I know this sounds (is) choleric and humourless. What I don’t understand is how people who turned up so casually had had the forethought to book so early. The idea of doing Christmas shopping before taking in a three-hour Romanian drama to round off the afternoon is bizarre. (Not that the Vue staff seemed to know what we were in for either. They were affably helpful, showing people to their seats and saying ‘Enjoy the movie’, but the effect was slightly spoiled when one of them asked another sotto voce, ‘What film is this?’) The BFI warm-up man announced Aurora as one of the highlights of the Festival. If the organisers see it that way, why do they let half the audience treat the film with such disrespect? Some people arrived too late to hear Cristi Puiu’s (succinct) introduction: his presence wasn’t billed in the Festival programme and it was great that he was there. He was likeably self-deprecating, admitting that Aurora was a long film and assuring us it was OK to walk out – although, he added, the seats seemed fairly comfortable. I should have stayed for the Q&A after the screening because I don’t understand why Puiu did Aurora in the way he did (I’m predisposed, thanks to The Death of Mr Lazarescu, to think he had good reasons). But the outing had made me feel geriatric: I’m not used to being in the centre of London on a weekend and it’s too hectic for me – after 181 minutes of Aurora, I wanted to get out of Leicester Square as quickly as possible and get home.
The main and utterly dominant character in the film, played by Puiu himself, is Viorel -fortyish, divorced, some kind of industrial consultant, living alone in a small Bucharest apartment. He’s not alone when we first see him. He’s in bed with a woman in her apartment. Viorel and the woman (I’m describing her thus because I never worked out how she related to him, which goes for some other characters in the film too) get dressed in the dark then have a hushed conversation – the woman’s young daughter is sleeping in the room next door and the walls must be thin – before he leaves. The woman tells Viorel that her daughter, after reading or hearing the story of Red Riding Hood, has asked her teacher at school why, when the grandmother is found in the wolf’s belly, she isn’t naked, since the wolf stole her clothes before he ate her. Viorel seems fascinated by this and so was I: it’s a striking illustration of the strange fusion of a child’s appetite for fantastical stories and aptitude for logical thinking. You’re immediately gripped and wanting to know what will happen next in Aurora. What happens is, in terms of events to include in a conventional plot synopsis, very little. And the pace at which the non-events don’t happen is gruellingly slow, as Puiu describes the next forty hours or so of Viorel’s life. The narrative often seems – because of Viorel’s tendency to hesitate or to repeat what someone’s said to him or to ask the interlocutor to repeat it – to unfold not so much in real time as in suspended time.
There were some bits, especially during the first third of Aurora, which were beyond me (and the film’s title isn’t the least of its mysteries – there’s not much dawnlike about it, even in an ironic sense, and I couldn’t locate a Sleeping Beauty). For example, there’s a sequence in which Viorel takes a shower in his flat. After turning on the water, he handles his genitals as if preparing to masturbate then starts feeling his belly and groin as if checking for lumps. Then he looks up at the meagre flow of the shower and sees water coming through the ceiling in greater volume – the result of a kid’s mucking about in the apartment upstairs. The latter is followed through but Viorel’s weird handling of himself isn’t. (Much later on, he claims that he’s terminally ill but you assume at that point this is an invention to shut up the person who’s asking him to justify his disturbing behaviour.) What’s more easily comprehensible in the early stages is that Viorel is getting himself a rifle and accessories, even if we don’t know whether or how he’s going to use the weapon. Once he’s ready to begin target practice (about a third of the way through the film) and, not too long afterwards, to start shooting people, you wonder if Puiu has made us spend an hour in his company to give a more vivid impression of how an apparently ordinary man becomes a killer. Yet the eloquently unhappy Viorel – with his barely suppressed anxiety, his edgy movements, his unnervingly quiet voice – never has been apparently ordinary. Whenever he’s listening intently to someone else – in the opening Red Riding Hood conversation, to his ex-mother-in-law as she slices potatoes for a moussaka she’s never going to get in the oven (Viorel strangles then shoots her) – the silence and the attentively threatening look in his eyes are very powerful. Yet what we learn about Viorel in the course of Aurora doesn’t justify its length. His personal possessions – a model car collection in his apartment, an Airfixed plane in his room back at his mother’s home – suggest that he hasn’t put away childish things, and the mother (Valeria Seciu) clearly still infantilises her son. But not enough to prevent his getting married, fathering two children, having sex with other women. There’s not enough to make us speculate about, or be tantalised by not knowing, what’s in Viorel’s mind and motivating his actions.
Audiences always seem doggedly anxious for films to turn into something they’ve seen before. After Viorel has killed the ex-mother-in-law and appears (deceptively) to be leaving the scene of the crime, a woman behind me whispered to her neighbor, ‘He’s left his coat!’ – hoping against hope that Aurora was going to morph into a conventional crime thriller and that she could start looking out for key details that would point to a neat conclusion. It’s quite funny – even if not, in the context of this movie, very comforting – when you then catch yourself being infected by these anticipations of the generic. Once Viorel has dispatched three people (his former wife’s lawyer then both her parents), you assume he’s going to progress further as a serial killer. There’s considerable tension when he goes, rifle in his sports bag, to a clothes shop, where he talks tensely with three female staff; or when he then goes on to his younger daughter’s school, where rehearsals for a Christmas show are underway. As it is, he doesn’t hurt another fly. Instead, he goes to a police station and confesses his crimes and at this point the tone of Aurora shifts, decisively if belatedly. There have been a couple of other sequences that give the proceedings an absurdist flavor: when men arrive to remove stuff from Viorel’s apartment prior to its being redecorated; in the apartment of his mother’s neighbour (Luminita Gheorghiu, who was wonderful in Mr Lazarescu and is vivid in a brief appearance here), with overlapping conversations and bedroom comings-and-goings in the background. But the police headquarters stuff is very broadly satirical. The first policeman he encounters gives Viorel a frisking rough enough for him to take issue with but the sluggish, insensitive detectives he’s then referred to don’t want to know he’s a triple murderer. It’s only after they’ve received confirmation of the dead bodies for which Viorel claims to be responsible that one says wearily to the other, ‘OK, take a statement’. Police, Adjective often gave the impression that there was very little crime happening in present-day Romania; Aurora seems to suggest that, even where it is going on, the indolent authorities would rather pretend otherwise. This closing sequence is saved from being tedious only by Puiu’s acting: Viorel is a little baffled at the law’s uninterest but it’s striking that his apparent potential for violence has vanished; confessing the killings, he seems at peace with himself. Puiu gives an admirable performance – but, since Viorel is in nearly every scene (what feels like nearly every frame), it’s a huge undertaking for a writer-director. You’re always inclined to wonder when a film-maker plays the main character if this is an act of egotism (Citizen Kane syndrome) but Cristi Puiu doesn’t seem self-admiring or self-aggrandising. A writer-director may cast himself in the lead for another reason, though – perhaps one that applies in Aurora. He may not trust anyone else to do the role because they’re liable not to get what he’s trying, what he wants them, to do.
24 October 2010
