Though surprising and perplexing throughout, Calin Peter Netzer’s terrific drama exemplifies many of the traits that have made the new wave of Romanian cinema so fecund. This winner of the Golden Bear at last year’s Berlin Film Festival casts an unflinching eye at human frailty while extracting darkest gallows humour from the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of Romanian society (whether before or after the fall of Ceausescu).
The film’s milieu is the contemporary nouveau riche. Cornelia (Luminita Gheorghiu) is a grotesque, and universally recognisable, example of the species: brassy blonde hair, vulgar fur coat, rampaging sense of entitlement. The wife of a doctor, this dedicated manipulator faces a crisis when her utterly useless adult son Barbu – the only person she really seems to love – kills a teenage boy while passing a car on the motorway.
To this point, Barbu has been straining a little at the apron strings. He has moved out and is in a relationship with a girl of whom Cornelia does not (of course) approve. Now she has the chance to use money, position and sheer strength of will to reassert her authority.
The personal melds with the political as the family seeks to make the problem go away: a witness wants a bribe; the parents of the dead boy must be visited; daddy needs to pull in favours from the medical examiner. Imagine Mildred Pierce at the Fireman’s Ball.
As so often in New Romanian Cinema, the camera probes curiously into places it shouldn’t want to go. The performances are simultaneously naturalistic and persuasively theatrical. The social analysis tends towards a weary fatalism. But the character of Cornelia really causes the film to stand out from a very distinguished pack.
In her first lead role, Gheorghiu (the nurse from The Death of Mr Lazarescu ) certainly doesn't create (or try to create) an admirable monster, but she conjures up a terrifyingly formidable one. That is, one imagines, how such battle-axes like to be seen.
What an arresting film. What a shame it’s receiving such limited distribution.
