→ April 18, 2021
→ By

Collective.

Collective has repeated the feat of 2019’s Honeyland by earning nominations in the Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature categories at the Oscars, and if I had a vote, I’d at least give it a nod in the first one. It’s an amazing story that became bigger and more impressive well after the filmmakers had already chosen their subjects, as a small group of investigative reporters helped bring down an entire government, only to have the same party voted back into power less than a year later.

Collective (Colectiv) was a nightclub in Bucharest, Romania, that was the site of a deadly fire caused by the use of pyrotechnics at an indoor concert, which ignited the soundproofing in the venue – the same cause of the Station fire in Providence, Rhode Island, about 12 years earlier. Where the Collective fire differed, however, was the lower death toll at the site; 26 people died at the scene, but 38 more died later in hospitals, with 146 people injured. An journalist at a daily sports newspaper, The Sports Gazette, saw the number of deaths in hospitals as worthy of further investigation, and the work he and his colleagues did uncovered a massive corruption scandal that included a supplier of disinfectants to hospitals diluting the solution ten times, rendering it ineffective, and the refusal to send some patients abroad to burn units for fear it would reflect badly on the ruling party. The technocrat who takes over the Ministry of Health after the government collapses discovers that the state-run health system is rotten to the core, and there is no straightforward way to fix it or root out corruption. In the end, therefore, little really changes, and we are left to think that the corruption will resume with the restoration of the Social Democrats to power and the government’s failure to replace incompetent hospital managers. In parallel, we see parts of the journey of one of the survivors, Tedy Ursuleanu, who was very badly burned, losing parts of both hands and suffering burns all over her body, as she tries to reclaim something of her life, creating an art installation that provides the movie with some of its most central imagery.

Collective works as a documentary more than anything else because the story is so incredible and so vast in scope. What must have seemed at first to be just a film that followed some investigative reporters looking into irregularities around a major tragedy turned out to be a scandal that reached the top levels of the Romanian national government – something the documentary makers couldn’t have anticipated. They also received what appears to be unfettered access to meetings held by the technocrat Minister, who comes across as a would-be reformer who wants to be as transparent as possible with the press and public, but whose hands are tied by existing regulations and contracts and realizes he can’t do anything he’d want to do to try to fix the system. Meanwhile, the reporters keep uncovering new angles to the scandal, enough that you would think Romanian voters would have had no interest in voting for the same party that oversaw the erosion of the state hospital network, but they did so, the one event in the film that probably could have used some more explanation. It means the film ends on something of a hopeless note, which I suppose was unavoidable – documentary makers can’t choose their endings – but it’s a gut punch to watch all of the survivors and victims’ family members for nearly two hours, only to see that the state and the voters just don’t care enough to act on it.

I’ve seen all five nominated documentaries, and Collective would be my choice for the award, with Crip Camp second. This film does what I think great documentaries need to do – it stays out of the way of the story it’s telling. That’s not always possible, depending on the circumstances of the film’s subject, but in this case the filmmakers’ access to the reporters, press briefings, and eventually the Ministry’s internal meetings obviated any need for narration or other structure. It can be very hard to watch in the early going, because the camera doesn’t shy away from the details – we have footage from inside the concert venue, and we see plenty of burn victims, including one stomach-churning shot of a victim in the hospital whose wounds contain live maggots – but this film, more than any of the other nominated ones, has the power to force changes, if not in Romania, then perhaps elsewhere in the world. We need more documentaries like this, and more reporters like those who broke the story, and Collective should be an inspiration to anyone who tells stories for a living.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 29, 2020
→ By

The Whistlers.

I doubt I would have even bothered looking for The Whistlers, which is free to watch on Hulu, if my friend Tim Grierson hadn’t named it one of his favorite films of 2020 so far. Submitted by Romania for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, The Whistlers missed the shortlist in a very competitive group, and perhaps was too quirky or absurd for the committee (who did nominate The Painted Bird, which you couldn’t pay me to watch given how much I hated the book). It’s a crime drama with a perfectly ridiculous twist that makes it one of the most interesting and unusual films I saw from last year, so even where the plot is a bit off, it still works and kept me engrossed till the end.

The Whistlers takes place in Romania and on La Gomera, one of the smaller islands in the Canaries, jumping back and forth in location and time to follow the main character, Cristi, a Romanian police officer, as tries to free a businessman named Zsolt who has been taken by an organized crime ring based on the island. I was completely unaware of this before watching The Whistlers, La Gomera has a whistling language called Silbo Gomero that has been used for centuries to communicate across the island’s valleys. (You can read more about it at UNESCO’s page, commemorating its inclusion on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.) To evade detection by foreign police officers, Cristi learns the whistling language, with comic misfires along the way, using it to talk to the various thugs with whom he’s working, along with the femme fatale Gilda, who is working with the criminals but also has her own agenda.

Cristi’s bosses suspect him of criminal involvement and have him under what appears to be nonstop surveillance, including bugging his apartment, which leads to all sorts of subterfuge, not least of which is Gilda pretending to be a sex worker, with Cristi a regular client, to fool the cameras. Of course, Cristi is hardly the only corrupt cop – one theme throughout every Romanian-language film I’ve seen is that pretty much everyone is corrupt – and it’s not really clear how effective their cover story is, especially given one detail towards the end of the film that was the only element I found hard to accept as plausible.

The Whistlers has a very neo-noir feel even with the comedic elements, thanks to a short list of named characters and a plot that has just about everyone in the story working multiple angles, including Cristi himself, reminiscent of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang orsome of the Coen Brothers’ work. The script plays the comedy very straight, respecting the whistling language even as Cristi looks utterly ridiculous trying to reproduce the sounds required for it, while also hiding enough of the byzantine machinations of all of the major characters to make the film’s resolution as suspenseful as you’d demand from a classic noir film.

Writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu is apparently better known for dramatic films, including Police, Adjective (which also stars Vlad Ivanov, who plays Cristi), so this script was a new turn for him, and his ability to write dark comedy is quite promising – and a welcome shift from the grim reputation of Romanian films. It also adheres to the spirit of traditional noir stories in that the actual crime at the heart of the plot, the theft of several million leus stuffed into a couple of mattresses, isn’t actually all that important to the film as a whole. This is about the interactions between the characters, with levity from Cristi’s difficulty mastering the whistling language, with an ending that ties the remaining threads together in clever, cohesive fashion.

Because The Whistlers was submitted and eligible for this year’s Oscars, I’ve included it as a 2019 film and added it to my ranking of all films from 2019 that I’ve seen.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 14, 2018
→ By

Graduation.

As a kid, I was always fascinated by maps, and especially by certain countries or parts of the world. Eastern Europe was one of those areas; the countries there all seemed more “foreign” because they were still behind the Iron Curtain (I’m old). Most of the people there speak Slavic languages that just sounded more different to my young ears, often written in different alphabets. Then you have Hungary, a country of non-Slavic people with a history and language unrelated to anyone else in Europe outside of Finland and Estonia (the latter of which wasn’t independent until I was in college), and its own complicated history of independence and subjugation. You had Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, two made-up countries resulting from international meddling and post-war treaties; neither exists any more, with Yugoslavia, at the time appearing to be the most moderate of Communist countries because its dictator, Tito, led the “non-aligned movement” of countries that declined to take sides in the Cold War. Yugoslavia comprised at least a dozen different ethnolinguistic groups, now split into seven independent countries, two of which have majority Muslim populations, two others of which speak the same language but use different alphabets for it and thus both claim they’re speaking something different. Czechoslovakia has been split into two countries, although there’s a historical third (Moravia) that appears to be gone for good. The Soviet Union itself subsumed at least nine independent countries in eastern Europe and the Caucasus, plus some short-lived entities like the Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus.

And then there was Romania, another oddball in the region, the only language east of Italy where the primary language is from the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family; Romanian has evolved a more complex, Slavic-influenced grammar due to its geographic and political isolation from other Romance languages, but if you’re fluent in any of the latter you can probably gather the gist of written Romanian. Moldova, an independent country on Romania’s border, also has Romanian as its primary language, but they call it Moldovan and insist that it’s a distinct tongue. (To say nothing of the Gagauz.) Transylvania, which is totally a real place, is now part of Romania. They were briefly one of the Axis-allied nations in World War II, along with Hungary and Bulgaria, the latter of which had a real knack for picking the wrong side in world wars. The country featured the most dramatic and violent shift to democracy, executing its dictator and his equally corrupt wife on live television, and at one point appeared to have a nascent software industry that might lead to rapid economic development.

That didn’t happen, and if you wanted to know just how Romanians view their country right now, Christian Mungiu’s latest film, Graduation, paints a grim portrait where corruption is so woven into the societal fabric that nothing would function without it. Mungiu won the Palme d’Or and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language film for 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and was named co-winner of the Best Director Prize at Cannes in 2016 for this movie, which Romania did not choose for its annual submission to AMPAS. (His 2012 film, Beyond the Hills, was Romania’s submission that year and made the shortlist but not the final five.)

Graduation, which is streaming on Netflix, tells a small story to explain the big theme of the rot that institutionalized corruption has caused in Romanian society. Romeo Aldea is a successful doctor in a modest city in western Romania who returned from somewhere abroad with his wife in the hopes that Romania was developing into a modern society. Their daughter, Maria, is about to take a critical test to secure her scholarship to Cambridge University in England, but the morning before the exam, she’s attacked by a would-be rapist, injuring her arm (so she can’t write easily) and traumatizing her. Romeo, who was busy with his mistress when he received the call that Maria had been hurt, decides to play the system, moving a patient up the list for a liver transplant in exchange for having his daughter’s exam graded favorably enough to retain the scholarship.

Romeo is an unpleasant fellow who would probably bristle at such criticisms; he’s even praised at one point in the film for his spotless reputation and refusal to take bribes from patients in the past. He clearly thinks he’s doing what must be done for Maria, given that this is how Romania works and that other parents wouldn’t hesitate to call in favors or pay bribes to help their kids – especially to get their kids out of the dead-end cycle the film tells us is trapping everyday Romanians in a lower-class, hopeless life. A western education at a premium university is a ticket out, and even though Maria seems to be waffling in the wake of the attack and her commitment to her shiftless boyfriend Marius, Romeo commits himself to this path, convinced he’s doing the right thing even as the situation starts to worsen around him.

The entire movie seems to take place on cloudy days in a city where every color is some shade of gray and the dominant architectural aesthetic might charitably be described as communist chic. There’s construction, but to no apparent end, and the chaos of it creates the opportunity for Maria’s attacker. A minor subplot involves Romeo’s mistress’s young son, who has a disability and may do better in a specialized public school that has no openings because they’re all reserved for siblings of current students – or for those who have paid their way in. Another thread revolves around Romeo’s affair and how his wife reacts not to the infidelity itself, which she already knew about, but to Maria’s discovery of it. Romeo still seems unfazed by the changing attitudes of everyone around him, including his daughter’s own disdain for his attempts to use the system to benefit her, because he’s so thoroughly convinced of his own correctness. And while it’s easy to condemn him from the other side of the screen, what parent among us wouldn’t bend or break a rule to help our children?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,