Directed by Cristian Munggiu, loana Uricaru, Hanno Hoffer, Razvan Marculescu, Constantin Popescu. Starring Diana Cavallioti, Radu Iacoban, Vlad Ivanov, Alexandru Potocean, Avram Birau, Ion Sapdaru 12A cert, lim release, 131 min

IF YOU were enumerating the masterpieces that you’re not sure you ever want to have to watch again, then 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days might feature towards the top of the list. Though deft, humane and economical, Cristian Mungiu’s Romanian abortion drama was an extremely gruelling piece of work. Nobody would mistake it for a barrel of monkeys.

So even the director's enthusiasts may waver before entering a cinema showing Tales from the Golden Age. Fear not. An omnibus film, written by Mungiu, but with contributions from four other directors, this wonderfully strange project does deal with many of the same themes tackled in 4 Months. But the film, again set in the last years of the Ceausescu regime, is marinated in such indignant, cabbage-flavoured humour that its grim fatalism never catches in the throat. It tells us terrible things, but does so with a wry, philosophical shrug.

Mungiu and his team have set out to dramatise a series of urban legends from the communist years. These are not stories of Mexican pets or vanishing hitchhikers. The tales tell, rather, of the various strategies – some pathetically desperate – Romanians employed to cope with the oppression, inefficiency and poverty that characterised the era.

One urban family invites catastrophe as they ponder how to kill a pig they have somehow acquired. Officials doctor a photograph of Ceausescu to make him seem as tall as a visiting Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. A pair of tragically minor outlaws ape Bonnie and Clyde as they con people out of empty bottles. A dog-eared femme fatale persuades a truck driver to steal the eggs from his vehicle. The inhabitants of a small town plan for the visit of an important official.

Mungiu refuses to explicitly reveal which director helmed which segment (if you go to the film's website, however, you will find some clues), but, despite the difference in tone, the omnibus trades in the same unhurried naturalism that made 4 Monthsso unique.

There is something of Jacques Tati in the story about the official visit. There is a great deal of early Milos Foreman throughout. But Tales from the Golden Ageis very much its own stubbornly resigned entity. Whistling in the dark has never sounded so poignantly desperate.