Today, tomorrow and Saturday the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art will host an event that, despite being an annual occurrence, has a relatively small profile amongst even the film-savviest Madisonians: The Romanian Film Festival. The emergence of the so-called Romanian new wave, a young cinema born nearly 30 years after similar movements popped up throughout eastern Europe, is one of the more curious developments in recent film history. Whether ""new wave"" is the best name for this movement remains open for debate; the first film screening in the festival is a French documentary, ""The New Wave of the Romanian Cinema"" (screens 6:30 p.m. Thursday), whose title seems to imply that the movement itself has embraced its contentious moniker.
Two movies are largely responsible for directing attention toward Romania's flourishing film scene: 2005's ""The Death of Mr. Lazarescu"" and 2007's ""4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days."" The former is a rigorously, relentlessly dark comedy that gets most of its kicks from an often uncomfortable absurdism; the latter was a kind of neo-realist horror film, a critique of former head of state Nicolae Ceausescu's Stalinist regime conducted from the perspective of two frightened girls arranging a black market abortion.
These two tremendously well-received works embody two key aspects of the new Romanian cinema: a satirical attitude toward Soviet-style bureaucracy and a desire to display the country's scars from the Ceausescu years for the rest of the world to see.
Brutal and repressive as Romania's recent political past may be, many native filmmakers seem to think that having a sense of humor is the healthiest way to move forward. Five of the eight films screening in the festival could be considered comedies, though some of them are so dry as to defy generic categorization.
One such film is Corneliu Porumboiu's ""Police, Adjective"" (screens 8 p.m. Thursday), which some Madisonians might have caught when it played in Memorial Union in February. ""Police, Adjective"" riffs on bureaucracy in an intensely deadpan manner—the occasional hysterics of ""The Death of Mr. Lazarescu"" are totally absent. The film's use of long takes and lulls in dramatic action yields plenty of room for contemplation, which is particularly handy given its self-consciously philosophical subtext.
The dry and the black are even more present in Andrei Gruzsniczki's ""The Other Irene"" (screens 7 p.m. Friday). It might be a stretch to call this movie—about a melancholy mall cop, his aspiring man-eater of a wife and the aftermath of an abrupt tragedy—a comedy; though it genre-hops unpredictably, its elliptical narration and claustrophobic compositions remain constant and striking. ""The Other Irene"" draws a provocative parallel between the acts of mourning a loved one and solving a morbid mystery.
Radu Jude's ""The Happiest Girl in the World"" (screens 9 p.m. Friday) is more explicitly comedic, though no less painful to watch. Recalling the behind-the-scenes mayhem of Catherine Breillat's ""Sex Is Comedy"" (2002), ""The Happiest Girl"" focuses on Delia, a slightly overweight high school student, and her sensationally unpleasant parents. Delia has won a contest to appear in a commercial for a never-named brand of orange juice; the commercial's consistently annoyed crew and the juice corporation's obnoxious suits collaborate to stage a stuttering, silly ensemble comedy that has a hint of Robert Altman to it. While the film has no shortage of loathsome characters, its humorously maddening take on the power struggle between idiotic capital and hapless labor is worth a look.
Although all the films included in the festival are historicist in one way or another, it's Napoleon Helmis' ""Wedding in Bessarabia"" (screens 4:30 p.m. Saturday), set in the Romanian part of Moldova, that most directly confronts Romania's Soviet past. Following the madcap proceedings as a young dude from Bucharest ties the knot with a Moldovan babe, ""Wedding in Bessarabia"" juxtaposes the folksiness of tradition with the innovations of modernity, the personal with the political and the increasingly westernized Romania of today with the authoritarian Romania of yesteryear. (The groom's jaded mother even waxes nostalgic for the Ceausescu period, offering an ""at least the trains ran on time"" line of argument.) This film, with its memorable personas, its flourishes of MTV-style editing and its happy ending, might hold the greatest appeal for anybody intimidated by the prospect of plunging into a national cinema they didn't even know existed until very recently.
There are several other films screening in the festival that I'm unfamiliar with, so I implore you to visit the festival's website, http://uwromania.rso.wisc.edu/ROFILM/index.html, for more information. All the screenings are free to attend. Take my word for it: Young people and young cinemas are always a good combination.
For more information, or further persuasion of why you should attend, e-mail Dan at dasullivan@wisc.edu.
