Amintiri din epoca de aur
Hanno Höfer, Cristian Mungiu, Constantin Popescu, Ioana Uricaru, Razvan Marculescu (2009)
Five short film stories, written by Cristian Mungiu and set in the later years of the Communist era in Romania. Each has a different director and is based on an urban myth of the period. (There appears to have been a sixth segment – ‘The Legend of the Zealous Activist’ – which isn’t included in the version of the film now being shown over here.) I spent an unusually long time asleep – don’t know why: I wasn’t bored by what was on screen – and missed virtually the whole of ‘The Legend of the Chicken Driver’, the third piece. I feel sorry as well as guilty about that. It’s the one that Mungiu directed – and the one which, judging from the conversation between Julian Barnes and his companion which I heard on the way out of the Renoir and from an online review on the Channel 4 website, seems to be particularly admired. The chicken driver is played by Vlad Ivanov, memorable as the abortionist in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. In that film, Mungiu set his story in this same historical context – he brought off an impressive balancing act so that the characters never seemed dramatically subordinate to the political message. I’m not sure the same can be said for the first, second and fourth tales in Golden Age but the last one – ‘The Legend of the Air Sellers’ – is a half-hour masterpiece.
In ‘The Legend of the Official Visit’ a senior party member, on the eve of the titular visit, tells the organising party to get hold of some pigeons for use in a rehearsal for the next day. The man who takes the phone call passes on the instruction to a uniformed colleague, who’s supposedly keeping an eye on a group of workmen. The man in uniform takes his leave of them to locate pigeons. ‘I’ll be gone half an hour’, he tells the workmen, ‘but I’ll be watching you’. He wilts from officiousness into limp cluelessness as soon as he’s out of their sight and left by himself with the problem of finding the birds. The ‘Official Visit’ ends with the organisers, the mayor et al on an all-night spin on a dizzying (in the mayor’s case nauseating) fairground ride. Its operator is also along for the ride: he’s just refuelled the mechanism and tells his companions it and they will keep on going until the tank is empty. The story is neat and witty and the monotonously circling ride is a splendid image – but it’s too tidy a representation of the absurd, entropic political system – which the characters can’t get off until it finally runs out of steam – to be more than neat and witty. ‘The Legend of the Party Photographer’ is about increasingly frantic efforts to manipulate a photograph of Nicolae Ceaușescu so that he doesn’t look ridiculous standing next to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who’s on a state visit to Romania. Needless to say, the efforts fail. (Giscard D’Estaing – in a hat – is so much taller than the bare-headed Ceaușescu that the French president looks daft too.) In ‘The Legend of the Greedy Policeman’ the title character takes illicit delivery of a pig just before the festive season (a relative term in Communist Romania – although this segment is a reminder that it was on 25 December 1989 that Ceaușescu and his wife were executed). The family expected their Christmas feast to arrive as dead meat rather than alive and kicking – how do they reduce it to pork? (I wasn’t convinced that no animals were harmed, or at least distressed, in the making of this section.) I know next to nothing about Eastern European political satire during the Communist period but all three of these stories, with their broad, sarcastic humour, feel circumscribed and unsurprising.
Like the ‘Greedy Policeman’, ‘The Legend of the Air Sellers’ illustrates the madly resourceful lengths to which Romanians were driven by their economic system. In other respects, it has a suppleness that’s lacking in the clever but predetermined stories that have gone before it. Crina, a teenager, arrives home from school one afternoon before either of her parents and opens the door to a young man from the Ministry of Chemistry, who tells her he’s in the apartment block in response to complaints from the tenants about their cloudy drinking water. He shows an ID and although Crina won’t admit him because she’s alone in the flat she fills a bottle from the tap for him to take away for testing. When her parents get home, she falls out with her father about money for a school trip (being organised, she says, by the students themselves and not, she insists, a ‘holiday camp’). Her caring, cautious father and mother have been saving for ages to buy a car. That evening, a girlfriend invites Crina over to her apartment, in a different block. On the way over, the girlfriend talks about her new boyfriend, who’s got a video player – a group of them are going to watch a film. The boyfriend, Bughi, turns out to be the young man from the Ministry of Chemistry and the video is Bonnie and Clyde. When, later on, Crina and Bughi chat outside the apartment building, he tells her that he makes a living from the water-testing scam: it’s a way of collecting considerable supplies of glass bottles, which he then sells off. He invites Crina to join him in doing this. They’re obviously attracted to each other, although her motives are probably more mixed than his: since possession of any kind of video player is a mark of material privilege in the neighbourhood and Crina is desperate for cash so as not to depend on her father for the outing from school, she readily accepts the invitation.
In ‘Air Sellers’ you’re interested in the characters in themselves, not just as vehicles to illustrate the ludicrous state of the nation. The relationship between Crina and Bughi really develops. Once the scam becomes a double act, she shows a flair for it and occasionally upstages her mentor. She’s pretty, articulate, thinks on her feet to come up with fluent, plausible lies in answer to tricky questions (she’s driven by a desire both for independence and to impress Bughi). The pair-from-the-ministry routines are very funny. Of course people are willing to accept the basic premise: their water is grotty (everyone is pretty sure it’s thanks to a local chemical plant). The tale takes its title from the point at which Bughi and Crina vary their usual spiel to say they’ve come to take air rather than water samples. This is the absurdist high point of the film. Crina ask for two types of bottle to fill with air, which she captures with scientific concentration. These have to be different bottles, she and Bughi explain to the elderly man in the flat, so that air quality in different parts of the block can be more finely compared. When the man asks what they do in three- rather than two-room apartments, Bughi says they use a champagne bottle for the third room: anyone with a three-room apartment must be rich enough to drink it. ‘You kids think of everything,’ says the satisfied citizen.
When they start going out together – he in his suit, she in the skirt and top she’s changed into from her school uniform – Bughi and Crina steal a car (his work isn’t so lucrative that he can afford one of those yet). In the depressed surroundings, the couple do seem relatively glamorous but the Bonnie and Clyde connection isn’t pushed too far. The group crowded round the small screen to watch a grotty black-and-white pirated recording of the picture in the apartment also hits home as a suggestion of how an adolescent cinema addict like Cristian Mungiu, born in 1968, might have had to access recent ‘decadent’ American cinema in the 1980s. And the whole atmosphere of this gathering – youngsters drinking, smoking, dancing – gives the sequence a sense of sensual, sexual possibility that’s unusual in Tales from the Golden Age. It’s as if once night falls there are ways of blotting out the glum monochrome of the daylight world which these people inhabit. The young actors in the main roles – Diana Cavallioti as Crina, Radu Iacoban as Bughi – are great, especially in how they express the couple’s different mental and emotional speeds. (Crina thinks faster than Bughi but, at the climax to the story, it’s her panic which causes the get-rich-quick scheme to unravel.) As soon as these two get together, political parable and human interest story are perfectly combined.
11 November 2009
