Cannes 2010: Those Romanians are at it again, LA TIMES

May 17, 2010 Sorin Adam Matei

My cell phone suddenly rang during a meeting with a grad student the other day. The device is set to a traditional, 1940s plain ring. It is the loudest I could find. I am either getting old and hard of hearing or my commute is getting noisier. My student smiled and asked ”Why! I expected a Romanian tune or something!” ”Why? I like Lost, too! It could’ve been the creepy tune with the band and the end just as well,” I answered. She giggled. She probably felt like Lawrence of Arabia who got his first call from the Sheriff of Mecca. It was 1916 and the Hashemite protector of the Holy Places wanted the British emissary to hear the new European Band he acquired for his court. He picked up the phone and called Lawerence’s field office in Jeddah, the entry point for the Holy City some 40 miles away on the Red Sea coast. Lawrence was mighty surprised. He hadn’t figured out yet that the time the Hashemite leader spent in Constantinopole as a member of the Turkish parliament might have introduced him to the modern accouterments of Fin de Siecle Europe. Technology and emotions are indeed universal.

Romanians can’t make a bad film. It’s, like, illegal in their country. Or at least not in their DNA.Over the last four years, filmmakers from the small Eastern European nation have swept into the south of France every May and put far bigger, more storied film cultures to shame, the U.S. and the fiercely proud host country among them. It started primarily with the critics’ favorite “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” in 2006, continued the following year with the powerful abortion drama “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” which won the Palme d’Or and hasn’t abated since, with last year’s “Police, Adjective” and “Tales from the Golden Age” worthy entries in the so-called Romanian New Wave. …

No U.S. distributor has yet bought this movie (or the other, equally promising Romanian film here, “Aurora,” from the same director as “Mr. Lazarescu”). While “Tuesday, After Christmas’ ” subject manner and style are eminently accessible to an American audience (it helps that, unlike a lot of the new Romanian cinema, this one is set not in the 1980s Communist period but the modern one, in a decidedly middle-class milieu; Romanian film characters have moved up in the world), we fear that the rocky commercial market for these kinds of dramas will scare off buyers. It won’t matter. The Romanians will keep making great movies, whether or not we turn out to see them.

via Cannes 2010: Those Romanians are at it again | 24 Frames | Los Angeles Times.