‘Self-flagellation cinema’ rakes it in

I know Călin Peter Netzer and have seen his films, although I have yet to see Child's Pose. I have seen the films of Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristian Nemescu and Tudor Giurgiu. I still live in a reality that quite often stifles the logic of civilisation. Society, prisons, hospitals, schools and other institutions are all breeding grounds for the artistic works of great value emerging from our New Wave cinema.

I still believe that our destiny, following the path of our emergence from communism, will lead one day to a Nobel prize for Romanian literature. Certainly Herta Muller has one, but for a work that plunged into the memory of communism rather than into communism itself.

A Nobel from the transition era?

I expect to see a Nobel Prize yielded up by the transition era, this era that the films of the Romanian New Wave have begun to depict - films that, had they won no international awards, we would ignore, since most of us think they defame Romania. These young people are trying to obtain funding from an organisation, the National Cinema Centre, that parts with it only under extreme duress. Still, we should help them, because they are capitalising on the global market on the only authentic item that we still have to offer: the suffering and despair of being Romanian. The despair at marching against history and on the side of civilisation. In today's world, though, this sells well, and we could be investing in this self-flagellation.

To paraphrase the famous line from the movie Filantropica by Nae Caranfil, since we always tend to have our hands stretched out to Europe, the IMF and the World Bank, at least let's offer up a pretty story. It would be a sublime form of begging. We sell you pills of despair; and you, happy Westerners, give us a little extra change, pleased to have escaped this drama because your countries were protected by the Yalta agreement.

Resourcefulness ranks as life philosophy

I have not yet seen Child's Pose, but The Death of Mr Lazarescu left me speechless, not because the work came from the conventional imagination, but because I knew that it was a true story. Netzer's film comes, in the same way, out of the Chekhovian tradition, from that despair of living in a universe where free will and freedom no longer have meaning.

I have seen Filantropica and California Dreamin' and I was captivated by the elevation of Romanian resourcefulness to a philosophy of life. With each release of a New Wave film I am overwhelmed by the idea that the absurd, in our eastern Europe, forms part of our ethos rather than any negation of rationality; and I feel a burning desire to read Anton Chekhov.

The characters in our films are Chekhovians. Romania in transition is a nailed-down universe that they are trying to flee, but they arrive at only illusion or death. The characters of Giurgiu, Porumboiu, Netzer and Mungiu are prisoners of a passing destiny, where the wait is a drawn-out agony. Hermetically sealed universes and pallid lighting are the dominant features of this current cinematography depicting our world. Rare are the darts of sunbeams. When they speak of abortion, faith, drugs, or the conversion of a community to capitalism, the films of the New Wave focus on individualism and extreme selfishness, betrayal and above all on loneliness, as a process of decomposition and the death of the social being. Most of the characters in these stories are women who are never able to wrest control of their own or their families' destinies, while their men have already given up the fight.

These films are open-ended, as if each of them had come to continue what the director had left in suspense in California Dreamin': a Romanian reality drifting on a course that no one can steer away from.

A look without hatred

What distinguishes these young people who have tried to swindle the cinema lovers of Europe, starting in 1989, following the principle of “New times, same old style”? These children have lived through the first steps of the transition. They contemplate the open wounds left by communism, and they have not experienced the compromises. They live in a dehumanising reality that transforms egotism into one of the values of the transition.

These children do not use their imagination to tell lies, but to tell a story. They grew up with “the key around their neck” in an era when no one had time to tell their stories. [In communist countries, children left for school very early and alone, with the house key hung on a string round their necks; today, these latchkey children symbolise those who have to fend for themselves.] But what distinguishes them above all is their look, which has no hatred in it. They tell their stories with detachment, record in pictures the destinies of a world in decay. They offer no solutions, but are the first free men and women of our world.

Unfortunately, they have no supporters in a Romania that cannot bear to look at itself in the mirror. Like millions of other Romanians, they are exiled in a West that celebrates them for a day, to let them fall back into indifference the next and sink into the drama of an Eastern European country that cannot escape this Chekhovian agony that we call transition.

Honours

God is a cinephile

The victory of Child's Pose, a story of the suffocating love between a mother and her son and a pitiless exposé on corruption in Romania, is further proof that recent Romanian cinema ranks “among the best,” writes România liberă. That, the newspaper observes, is a paradox. Romania, after all, is a country

where most cities do not even have a cinema, where there is very little money for producing films, and where distribution causes a scandal every time.

The newspaper draws a parallel between the success of Romanian films in international competitions and the success of Romanian gymnasts at the Olympics, saying –

The film from Călin Netzer was somewhat borne aloft during the Berlinale by our sportsmen's Olympic medals. This isn't a case of marketing, but of clear similarity. Athletes as well as artists have brought prizes home to Romania despite the lack of favourable conditions. We have had swimming and water polo champions without having had swimming pools, just like, with tiny budgets, we brought home the Palme d'Or [in 2007 for Cristian Mungiu's film, 4,3,2] and the Golden Bear. Nothing that the authorities for culture and sport have done justifies these prizes. Miracles fall within the competence of God. A God, thankfully, who is a cinephile.