Pain and shame is the short answer. Pain for wasting time. Shame for the FIPRESCI and Golden Bear jury. This was supposed to be the story that some people guessed from the poster and the small synopsis. But the story is nowhere to be found. You get a woman (Luminita Gheorghiu) talking to another woman about a third. Than you get two more scenes, this time with lots of extras that should express what? None of the nomenklatura princelings from the credits has any idea. Only than the movie starts. Starts into a bad provincial play. Each character is like a mechanical puppet. Apart from some tears in the end, the lines are delivered flat. And you feel the moment the director makes the magical sign to power on the mechanical puppets. You get the police station. Outdoors. A man is calm. The blond old women deliver their lines with obvious bore. Like Frankenstein awaken the man becomes agitated. He even goes to his car to get a baseball bat. Next scene, same time. Indoors. The same man is docile.
A lot of unused characters. A lot of pointless scenes. Yet NO STORY. Sure, Romanians seem to identify the story with local political circus. But how about the people who can't play their own imagined story when the trigger stimulus kicks in? There is no change. The characters remain flat all the way. The music is bad. The contrast in volume is disturbing. And it all ends with an Italian song??? The camera is awful. Maybe it's a subtle irony: the killer does not drink, but the camera operator does. The frame bounces and swirls around with no clear purpose. To make things worse there are erratic zooms too. Why? It's a mystery.
Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch
A lot of unused characters. A lot of pointless scenes. Yet NO STORY. Sure, Romanians seem to identify the story with local political circus. But how about the people who can't play their own imagined story when the trigger stimulus kicks in? There is no change. The characters remain flat all the way. The music is bad. The contrast in volume is disturbing. And it all ends with an Italian song??? The camera is awful. Maybe it's a subtle irony: the killer does not drink, but the camera operator does. The frame bounces and swirls around with no clear purpose. To make things worse there are erratic zooms too. Why? It's a mystery.
Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch