Partwork of cinema’s Romanian wave has been a shrewd, satirically surreal use of archive clips as a manner of remembering the strangeness of the nation’s communist and pre-communist previous. In 2010, Andrei Ujică’s three-hour The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu was a movie footage collage of his dictatorial life and instances; and in 2020 Radu Jude’s The Exit of the Trains used official archive materials to make clear wartime antisemitism. Jude, with co-director Christian Ferencz-Flatz, has now curated a found-footage fever dream of Romania’s post-Ceauşescu ardour for capitalism.
It’s a mosaic of moments from TV adverts within the Nineties, frantically flogging every little thing: delicate drinks, sausages, laxatives, a brand new Dracula-based theme park, shares in Thatcher-style authorities privatisation schemes and cellphones. One reasonably witty advert has Ceauşescu making a speech being interrupted by a telephone – the tagline guarantees “free speech”. Romanian legends like Ilie Năstase and Nadia Comăneci seem, whereas the clips are broadly divided into chapter-headings; one tranche of adverts displaying gender stereotypes is launched with the Godardian intertitle “Masculine Female”. Generally Jude and Ferencz-Flatz take out the audio solely so we are able to simply deal with the eerie garish pictures in silence. Freeze-frames present us the quasi-porn ecstatic closing of eyes in the meanwhile of style. Advertisements for precise porn telephone strains present us one thing related. In a single “chopping room flooring” second, we see a number of takes of an sad actor in an advert for monetary providers stumbling over the road “All of us attempt to multiply your cash” again and again.
It’s an amusing assortment – a glimpse of the id of Romania’s new psyche – however maybe the identical factor might be executed and the identical level made with TV adverts from wherever on the planet. (In our on-line social media world, these expensively crafted vignettes themselves look a little bit vintage.) I’m wondering if there may be furthermore a contact of naivety in a prestigious film director treating adverts as crude, virtually unauthored primitive materials to be sarcastically edited and juxtaposed by a better creative thoughts. Many promoting administrators, in any case, go on to make good movies – together with the good Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu who, earlier than he was an arthouse film-maker of word, made a collection of amusing TV adverts for cellphones that includes the yet-to-be-discovered actor Vlad Ivanov. At any charge, it is a diverting addition to Jude’s filmography.
