“That’s life” is often heard throughout Lucian Pintilie’s adaptation of Ion Băieșu’s novel The Oak. It’s such a sweeping response to the grotesqueries that mark everyday life amid the death throes of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship, during which the film is set, that it practically becomes a shibboleth. The words may seem little more than a verbal shrug, but in the mouths of Pintilie’s characters, full to bursting with lust for life, they express a liberatory side of absurdism that goes beyond mere politics. That the meaning and the mechanisms of their lives are unknowable is as much cause for jubilation as despair.
Fittingly, The Oak opens with a death—that of Truica (Virgil Andriescu), former colonel in the Securitate (Romania’s secret police agency during its communist regime) and father to Nela (Maia Morgenstern), the film’s protagonist. As his caretaker, Nela projects for him...
Fittingly, The Oak opens with a death—that of Truica (Virgil Andriescu), former colonel in the Securitate (Romania’s secret police agency during its communist regime) and father to Nela (Maia Morgenstern), the film’s protagonist. As his caretaker, Nela projects for him...
- 4/24/2023
- by William Repass
- Slant Magazine
Hello! How are you? is the film that helmer Alexandru Maftei hopes will represent a new era in Romanian cinema: an era of the films for the general public. Maftei sophomore film follows his debut pic, Fii cu ochii pe fericire. A decade has passed since his debut and follow up picture and during all this time, Maftei worked mostly in advertising until he felt the need to come back to his first love: making movies. But he didn’t want to show the same old stories that we got used to see in Romanian films. He wanted to make people laugh. He wanted people to feel good watching a Romanian movie. He wanted that, at least for about an hour and a half, the public would forget about everyday problems from both the past and the present. So he made this film – a romantic comedy, a rarity in Romanian...
- 11/16/2010
- IONCINEMA.com
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