European Films

 

On the first page of Bram Stoker’s Victorian horror classic Dracula, Jonathan Harker notes in his journal that he had arrived to the city of Klausenburgh “after nightfall”. Now better known as Cluj, the city is the capital of the Transylvania region in the Carpathian mountains. The region owes much of its international fame to the fact that Stoker’s titular character called it home, a fame no doubt widened by the countless film adaptations that followed the novel’s release in 1897. In early June, Cluj now hosts the annual Transylvanian Film Festival, which showcases the best of young European and world cinema as well as the annual Romanian film production during the Romanian Days. It seems a fitting way for the region to return the favour to the medium that literally put it on the map for many.

Ahead of the pack arrived the local film 4 luni, 3 saptamini si 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), which had won the Palme d’Or in Cannes just a week prior to the start of the festival. The film’s director, Cristian Mungiu, gracefully withdrew his second film (after 2002’s Occident) from the main competition, unburdening the jury of the task of essentially having to decide whether to agree or agree to disagree with their colleagues in Cannes.

 

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days tells the harrowing story of Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), a girl who often acts before thinking about the consequences and who with the help of her friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), tries to obtain an illegal abortion during the waning days of the Ceausescu regime. The act seems not so much a rebellion against any moral codes or laws that need to be overcome, but against the regime itself. By focusing on the friend rather than the pregnant girl, Mungiu allows for the story to be about so much more than the simple abortion itself; Otilia not only helps out Gabita but also needs to rush to the house of her boyfriend to meet his parents on the occasion of his mother’s birthday.

 

What emerges is a picture of a society in which the foreign cigarettes that are used to bribe everyone acquire an importance that betrays the country’s lack of normal relationships and normal social interaction. The barbarous man who performs the abortion (Vlad Ivanov) is as harsh as anyone, demanding a price that is the not so much the result of the fact that abortions are illegal and he could end up in jail but of people’s irrational fear of being found to not toe the party line. This fear creates a black market where commodities both material and immaterial are available for the highest bidder and some are forced to pay literally devastating prices for what they think they really need.

 

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is the director’s first in a series of films ironically titled Tales from the Golden Age, like that other devastating recent film that explores the ills of Romanian society through the illnesses of its inhabitants: the contemporary, Bucharest-set Moartea domnului Lazarescu (The Death of Mr Lazarescu), which is the first in a series of tales from the Bucharest suburbs.

 

What is noteworthy in both titles is that they mix two strengths and use them to full effect: their stories resonate on both a personal level for the characters and on a more general level for the times portrayed and the state of Romanian society in general, often showing people in a disconnect with the world around them, while on the other hand the films' formal aspects are so rigorously composed and adhered to that they cannot be divorced from the storytelling -- though Lazarescu and 4 Months, despite being shot by the same cinematographer, Oleg Mutu, and both strongly relying on steadycam and handheld work, are two distinct films with two different formal conceptions.

 

The disconnect between what people want and what they are dealt by life and the difference (and, more often than not, the similarities) between communist and post-communist society and how evil has a similar face in both also was confirmed in the Serbian-German-Hungarian co-production Klopka (The Trap).  The film is set in post-Milosevic Serbia, where some kids want a cell phone and others would be happy washing car windscreens for some change and where a family is torn to shreds because of the incurable illness of the only child, a young boy. The family’s desperation leads the mother to place an advert seeking people willing to donate some money towards the boy’s necessary but criminally expensive treatment abroad. Like in the recent Irina Palm, the ill boy is really a plot convenience that is only needed to push otherwise intelligent people over the threshold and into the devil’s domain: sex for money in Irina Palm and a killing for money in Klopka.

 

In both films, the Faustian pact is proposed by Serbian actor Miki Nikolajevic, though Klopka has the inverted trajectory of Irina Palm: it starts off on a very strong note, with an ominous score and a clever intercutting of scenes on different timelines to create tension, but whereas Irina Palm got better and took some unexpected turns as it wore on, Klopka becomes more predictable and bland, finally straying into telenovellas territory when it is revealed that the widow of the assassinated man suggests -- unwittingly -- to put up her inherited money to finance the operation of the son of her husband’s killer. It seems that though the evils of communism have long been traded in for the evils of capitalism, the implausible plot contrivances of some stories are here to stay.

 

The state of being in between to states -- between indecision and decision, between communism and capitalism and between including or excluding a certain plot development -- is the subject of the evocative Swedish film Farväl Falkenberg (Falkenberg Farewell), which is also part of the competition at TIFF. Directed by newcomer Jesper Ganslandt -- who also co-stars -- Falkenberg looks at a group of male friends as they float in the heat of the last summer that separates them from adulthood. There are almost no plot developments to speak of in the film, as the motley, grungy-looking crew tries to understand where they are going by looking back to where they came from. In the mean time, the summer wears on and decisions need to be made -- if they can be faced, that is.

 

The film evokes the recent work of Gus Van Sant and even echoes some of the work of Van Sant’s great inspiration Bela Tarr simply by making a film that is about one moment and one decision. Though in technical terms Ganslandt’s work is not as static and extreme as Tarr’s or Van Sant’s (and perhaps because of that not as hypnotic either), it is commendable for its unflinching focus on how carefree each moment can be until a decision needs to be made, and how the past, as an accumulation of our decision-making, can nevertheless be of comfort. It is the unknown territory of what lies ahead that is truly scary, inducing these youngsters to try and extend their time of indecision to beyond infinity.

 

From neighbouring Norway comes another film about youngsters that struggle with moments past and the future: Joachim Trier’s Reprise. Just by comparing the slightly more optimistic – though perhaps also more judgemental -- title of this first film with the fatality of its Swedish neighbour (Farewell!) indicates that the though the two films are perhaps interested in overlapping subject matter their approach is radically different and this not only in the treatment of the themes but also -- one might even say especially -- on an aesthetic level.

 

Trier’s story of two aspiring writers and a girl is more indebted to the French New Wave, with agile camera-work and editing that display a freshness and directness that goes straight back to Truffaut. The film’s preoccupation with memory, however, feels wholly contemporary, which is Trier’s great advantage: he might tip off his hat to the French New Wave and talk about memories, but he did not actually live through that period, which means he has had to reinvent that peculiar brand of freshness and world weary realism all over again, coming a lot closer to that original freshness than filmmakers who were already working in that period and are still working now (Philippe Garrel's Les amants réguliers plays in one of TIFF's sidebars and is a good example of this).

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly in what is nevertheless a surprising film, several sequences in Reprise are filmed in black and white, an element it shares with the Icelandic competition title Börn (Children), the first and best part of a diptych from director Ragnar Bragason (the other part, also unsurprisingly, is called Foreldrar/Parents). Bragason’s film is entirely filmed in black and white, signalling an interest, like cinematographer Oleg Mutu and the Romanian directors he has worked with, of other young European filmmakers to wisely pay attention to the technical means available to them to tell their stories in the best possible way.

 

In Reprise, the sequences are like deleted scenes from a French New Wave title, while in Börn it seems to underline the bleakness of both the Icelandic landscape and of the characters’ lives. Dysfunctional families are a topos in Iceland storytelling that stretches back years, but by employing black and white Bragason visually underlines his exploration of the grey areas. As a third example, one could mention Icelandic director Dagur Kari’s  black and white, Denmark-set comedy Voksne mennesker (Dark Horse) (not part of the TIFF competition), which used the absence of colour to set his slightly askew version of Denmark apart from reality and also to amply one single and very powerful in colour.

 

One of the biggest assets of Börn is its strong acting, something that could also be mentioned of Reprise and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and which could be considered suprising since the works are all by young director. In all three films, young actors give fearless performances as characters at least partially inhabited by fear: Icelandic Shooting Star Gísli Örn Garðarsson as the thug with a golden heart in Börn, Anders Danielsen Lie as the writer who suffers from mental problems after his successful debut and who tries to recapture the time from before his meltdown in Reprise and Anamaria Marinca as the student girl who tries to find a balance between helping out her friend who needs an abortion and satisfying the demands of her boyfriend and his family and, more generally, the police state she lives in.

 

All three characters go back and forth between posing as strong individuals in a difficult, problem-ridden society and retreating into their protective shells at intervals, as if a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde personality were a prerequisite of survival. They all point to the idea that friends are needed for survival as well: whether they are parents, children or unrelated souls.

 

A fourth addition to this list could come in the form of the two rooftop friends in Daniel Sánchez Arévalo’s debut AzulOscuroCasiNegro (DarkBlueAlmostBlack). Jorge (Quim Gutiérrez) has had his work as a apartment building janitor thrust upon him because of his father’s ill health, while his best friend  Israel (Raul Arévalo) discovers more about himself through spying on his father from the rooftop with a pair of binoculars. Both try to come to terms with matters in which they have little choice and as such operate on the same emotional level as the characters created by Garðarsson, Danielsen Lie and Marinca. The big difference between these characters and Jorge and Israel, is that they at least have each other: they might be islands, but the waters between them are shallow enough to wade through when necessary, which gives the film a decidedly more optimistic outlook on human relationships than most of the other films screened at Cluj.

 

The two Arévalos are certainly worth watching. Director Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, like his peers, displays a strong sense of aesthetics, opting for gliding camerawork and warm, slightly saturated colours that seem designed not so much to enhance the story but be an integral part of it (note the title!). Actor Raul Arévalo, who also stars in Antonio Banderas's second film as a director El camino de los ingleses (Summer Rain) which screened in a TIFF sidebar, is easily the most noteworthy thespian in both films, using his obvious talents to turn quickly sketched characters into unforgettable everyday heroes.

 

The last European film in competition is the Swiss-German co-production Wir werden uns wiederseh'n (So Long, My Heart) from directors Stefan Hillebrand and Oliver Paulus, which follows a newly arrived male nurse called Holger (Tom Jahn) at a facility for elderly people in the German city of Mannheim. He is not exactly an everyday hero, though all his female colleagues seem certainly easily excited by the affable and easy-going man. In fact, the problem for Holger is not being liked: it is committing himself and sticking with his decision.

 

Hillebrand and Paulus, who also wrote the screenplay together, have extended this theme to the tone of the film, which oscillates between tragicomic and dramatic, with the occasional fantasy sequence. It is an interesting choice that does not fully work, though the characters are so deeply human that it is hard to fault them for their humanity. Like the protagonists of most films at this year's edition of the Transylvanian International Film Festival, Holger is wandering soul who would just like to connect. It is just that his mind seems to prefer indecision, hoping it will act as a shield from potential disaster. Seen what waiting for over four months, three weeks and two days could get him it, Holger can hardly be blamed.