Meet the film­mak­ers redefin­ing the Roman­ian New Wave

Roma­nia was well rep­re­sent­ed at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val this year. As well as hav­ing two films in the main com­pe­ti­tion, Cristi Puiu’s Sier­aneva­da and Cris­t­ian Mungiu’s Grad­u­a­tion, there was Dogs, direct­ed by new­com­er Bog­dan Mir­ică, in the Un Cer­tain Regard sec­tion, 4:15pm End of the World, by Cătălin Rotaru and Gabi Vir­ginia Sar­ga, in the short film com­pe­ti­tion and All Rivers Run to the Sea by Alexan­dru Badea in the Cinéfondation.

A few days before the fes­ti­val start­ed, I received an email from a Roman­ian pro­duc­er urg­ing me to sign a peti­tion call­ing for ​“a dif­fer­ent kind of Roman­ian cin­e­ma,” a cin­e­ma that should ​“enter­tain and inter­est us, instead of annoy­ing or bor­ing us to death, a cin­e­ma about the beau­ti­ful side of Roma­nia, with char­ac­ters that are nice.” As sym­pa­thet­ic as I was to this sin­cere, if some­what naive, cin­e­mat­ic plea, I couldn’t help smil­ing try­ing to imag­ine what Puiu’s answer to this exhor­ta­tion might be.

Are there any ​“nice” Roman­ian peo­ple in the films pre­sent­ed in Cannes this year? Yes, but they are either vic­tims of cor­rup­tion, such as the father char­ac­ter, played by Adri­an Titieni, in Grad­u­a­tion; of sex­u­al assault, as with the daugh­ter in Grad­u­a­tion, played by the angel­ic Maria Drăguș; or else they are com­plete­ly out of their depth and suc­cumb to a trag­ic fate, like the char­ac­ter Roman, played by Dragoș Bucur, in Dogs.

The lat­ter film, a grue­some sto­ry of evil lurk­ing in the seem­ing­ly bucol­ic Roman­ian coun­try­side, rep­re­sents a slight depar­ture from the Roman­ian New Wave aes­thet­ic. Although the per­for­mances are still nat­u­ral­is­tic, the film is sub­tly stylised, with direc­tor Mir­ică using insid­i­ous and unnerv­ing track­ing shots through­out, giv­ing the film its lan­guid rhythm. The open­ing sequence, in which the cam­era tracks smooth­ly over a stag­nant pond before clos­ing in on a sev­ered human foot, is rem­i­nis­cent of the open­ing of David Lynch’s Blue Vel­vet. Speak­ing about his cre­ative deci­sions, Mir­ică explains, ​“I want­ed to shoot the film in a clas­si­cal style, using a com­bi­na­tion of super slow track­ing shots and ample cam­era move­ments, in widescreen, which gives it a cer­tain breadth. We even used a 10 meter-high crane.”

This depar­ture from the Roman­ian New Wave is not lim­it­ed to visu­al style: Mirică’s ellip­ti­cal sto­ry echoes Amer­i­can neo-west­ern thrillers such as No Coun­try for Old Men – cer­tain­ly more overt­ly than any­thing from his native cin­e­ma. He reveals that the inspi­ra­tion for the sto­ry was pro­vid­ed by vio­lent events he wit­nessed as a child: ​“I grew up in the coun­try­side, near Târ­gov­iște, where I saw many dis­turb­ing scenes – peo­ple hit­ting each oth­er with axes, or using bicy­cle chains. In a civilised soci­ety, you’d expect some causal­i­ty: if you don’t pro­voke an inci­dent, noth­ing bad will hap­pen to you. But here, the vio­lence was often gratuitous.”

This vio­lence and a per­vad­ing sense of evil in Mirică’s film is enhanced by the pres­ence of musi­cal score, which are gen­er­al­ly absent from Roman­ian New Wave films. For Mir­ică, music is extreme­ly impor­tant, even at the writ­ing stage: ​“If I’m lis­ten­ing to the wrong playlist, I write the wrong things.” While work­ing on the script for Dogs, he played the Nick Cave/​Warren Ellis sound­track for The Propo­si­tion for months on end. His hope was that the music in Dogs would allow the audi­ence to ​“lose them­selves in the tex­ture of the film.” Although Mir­ică con­fess­es that he used an ​“enor­mous amount of music” for the sound­track, its sub­lim­i­nal qual­i­ty is per­haps the rea­son some crit­ics missed it entire­ly (“unadorned with music or oth­er dis­trac­tions,” wrote Peter Debruge in Variety).

In con­trast to Dogs, there is no music in either Puiu or Mungiu’s films. The Roman­ian New Wave, with its strong empha­sis on real­ism, sim­ply wouldn’t allow it. In Grad­u­a­tion, which tells the sto­ry of a father who goes to great lengths to steer his daughter’s future in the right direc­tion after she is almost raped in broad day­light by an unknown assailant, music is heard only when the radio is on or a CD is play­ing. The father lis­tens to Andreas Scholl’s per­for­mance of Handel’s ​‘Ombra mai fu’ repet­i­tive­ly, a way to also empha­sise the high ideals and sphere of con­scious­ness he aspires to.

“We always believe that what we do in the name of affec­tion for some­one is right. But if what you do con­tra­dicts what you say to your chil­dren, you have a prob­lem.” says Mungiu. Refer­ring to Adri­an Titieni’s won­der­ful­ly restrained per­for­mance, and more specif­i­cal­ly the only scene in the film where he breaks down, the direc­tor com­ments: ​“In this type of cin­e­ma, it’s very dif­fi­cult to show what char­ac­ters feel deep inside them­selves. There are times in life when you feel that the most impor­tant events have already hap­pened and you’re only left with some hope for your chil­dren. We always try as par­ents to appear strong but we also have weak­er moments and I want­ed to show one of those weak­er moments with that scene.”

There are cer­tain­ly plen­ty of ​“weak­er moments” in Puiu’s Sier­aneva­da. The film cen­tres on a fam­i­ly get­ting togeth­er to com­mem­o­rate 40 days since the pass­ing of their patri­arch. Filmed almost entire­ly in a cramped apart­ment in Bucharest, the char­ac­ters walk and talk non-stop, con­stant­ly in and out of rooms, giv­ing the impres­sion of a dis­joint­ed fam­i­ly. This idea is also reflect­ed in the loose, repet­i­tive struc­ture of the film. Like life itself, Sier­aneva­da is made up of frag­ments of con­ver­sa­tion, pet­ty triv­i­al­i­ties and hys­ter­i­cal inci­dents, many of which were direct­ly expe­ri­enced by Puiu, his actors or the peo­ple they know.

Renowned as an exper­i­men­tal film­mak­er in the John Cas­savetes mould, Puiu felt it was time to let his actors con­tribute to the con­struc­tion of their char­ac­ters: ​“The ini­tial script I wrote was dif­fer­ent, the char­ac­ters were much nicer. I’m a nice per­son, you know…” He also con­fessed that his late father (whose death inspired him to make this film) was a real ladies’ man and that he only dis­cov­ered this fact when he was a teenag­er. ​“I nev­er had the impres­sion I real­ly knew him, and the same is true for my broth­er and sis­ter; peo­ple are full of sur­pris­es. That’s why I’m mak­ing this kind of cin­e­ma – about rela­tion­ships, about human communication.”