East is best

Among seasoned movie patrons and proper buffs the current consensus holds that cinema emerging from Romania and Turkey is the new black. For art house connoisseurs, these twin dynamos hover around the same hallowed spot once occupied by French films in the sixties or German output during the early seventies. With Turkish cinema, it’s easy to see the appeal: informed by cultural clashes between east and west, tradition and modernity, there’s a state of flux and a host of divergent influences working to create an exciting new grammar.

Young Romanians, however, have taken much of their inspiration from a most unlikely source. For these emerging filmmakers, the final years of the Nicolae Ceausescu era have become particularly fecund territory.
These were, for all the hardships suffered, colourful times. While most of the Eastern Bloc’s post-war Communist countries were ruled by anonymous apparatchiks, the aggressively nationalist Ceausescu fostered an elaborate cult of personality.
One of the leader’s most terrifying programmes was the campaign for mandatory motherhood. Decree 770, issued in 1966, outlawed abortion and rewarded mothers of multiple children with medals. This grim state of affairs became the background for Critian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, the harrowing tale of a young woman seeking a backstreet abortion during the last days of the regime.
The film, a winner at Cannes and countless prestigious festivals, became an unlikely international hit in 2007.
“The film was based on a true story told to me by a young woman who had experienced it,” says the writer-director. “I never thought I was going to make a film out of it. I was trying, rather, to adopt the kind of attitude that the film’s characters have by the end: “We’re going to sweep this under the carpet and never speak of it again.” But it brought back so much emotion and anger about the period so I decided it was too important to let it go.”
Nobody was more shocked by the film’s global success than its author; “I had no expectations whatsoever. I wanted the film to make it to Cannes but I was surprised when it was selected for competition. It just seemed to touch people no matter where they were from. So we have hopes for this new film. Humour travels much better than drama.”
The new film, Tales from the Golden Age, is an absurdist, omnibus comedy composed of five separate vignettes set against the grim, final years of Ceausescu’s reign. “The last ten or 15 years of the regime were particularly difficult,” says Mungiu. “There were food shortages, there was no money. There was the knowledge that you were constantly being watched. It all started with a state visit to North Korea. It gave him ideas about the cult of personality, about grandeur that he pursued afterwards. Hundreds of people were left homeless so he could build his palace. Schools and villages were constantly taken up with parades and flag-waving.”
For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding their ghastly, self-proclaimed ‘President’, the vast majority of Romanians weren’t buying into the official line. “It was common knowledge that they could barely read or write,” he says. “Elena Ceausescu was put forward as this great chemist and many people were employed to write her books. But we all knew. There were many jokes about how she would mispronounce chemical names. I don’t know why she decided on chemistry but she never became any more convincing about it. It was a constant source of jokes and urban legends. In Romania, when we use the term ‘urban legend’, it’s slightly different from the Anglo conception. These are stories that actually happened. They were reported in newspapers. The details may differ according to the storyteller but the core remains the same and is historically truthful.”
The stories, all written by Mr. Mungiu, vary in tone; one documents a village’s frantic attempts to prepare for an official visit, another plays out as Bonnie and Clyde in a bottle bank exchange. “This is not a chronicle of the times, it’s not didactic, it’s not even anti-Communist,” says the director. “These are portraits of everyday life and the side effects of a totalitarian regime. If you put too much political information in, the film cannot stand up. Once you stuck on messages, you lose the story and the film cannot translate to audiences beyond those immediately depicted.”
The film’s lively comedy provides a neat counterpoint to the horrors depicted in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. This, says the director, is only right; comedy is what helped Romania survive. “We never had organised political resistance in the way that, say, the Czechs had”, says Mr. Mungiu. “But we had jokes and hidden subtexts buried everywhere. Those were our weapons. So the film is a tribute to that.”