Cristian Mungiu and the Trauma of Communism

Amir Siadat

Realism; The Need of the Time

In a famous scene from Tarkovsky's Mirror, after making sure that there was no mistake in proofreading of the newspaper, the mother relaxes under the shower to wash away the toxic thoughts that have disturbed her mind during the past hours. Her look and facial expressions show both peace and disturbance together. She laughs and cries at the same time; Laughter because the danger is no longer exists, and crying because she knows that illusions are still standing and disasters are lurking. You know the historical background of this scene: during the years of Stalin's rule, the editorial board of a literary magazine was arrested and deported to a labor and reform camp, due to a typographical error of typing the Soviet leader "Sralin" (meaning excrement). If Mirror that resonates Tarkovsky's distant memories easily finds its way into the collective memory of the Soviet people, it is because of the charm of such moments. We are not sure if what we have seen comes directly from the real experiences of Tarkovsky's mother, as an editor of a government publishing house in Moscow, or if it is simply a reflection of the nightmares of the young Andrei (who must have feared that the disaster of the literary magazine would one day overtake his mother as well), but ultimately it must be a representation of the shared pain of all the victims of totalitarianism. The mother laughs under the shower because the fear she experienced really has a ridiculous and stupid reason; She cries because she inevitably has to live a life with this stupid and humiliating situation.

Totalitarianism can be comic or tragic depending on whether we are far from it or close to it. For Tarkovsky, communism was an endless nightmare; As long as he was in its territory, he could not see its ridiculous side, and even later when he emigrated, the sufferings of exile did not allow him to get rid of this nightmare. For filmmakers like Cristian Mungiu, who saw the collapse of the wall in his youth, the situation is completely different. In one of the episodes of Tales from the Golden Age (which Mungiu wrote the script for – before the production of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days - and later co-produced as a supervisor), the party members are gathered to discuss a picture that is supposed to be printed on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper. In this photo, which is related to the meeting between Ceaușescu (President of Romania) and Valery d'Estaing (President of France), the Romanian statesman, unlike his French counterpart, is not wearing a hat, and the members are worried that it might be suspected that comrade Ceausescu is taken off his hat for the French President (and in other words, hats off to capitalism!) Although the agents of the surveillance put a hat on Comrade Ceausescu's head with the help of retouching, they forget to remove the other hat in his hand, and they realize their mistake after the newspaper is distributed! What Mungiu is trying to convey here is the stupidity of ideological relations!

Destiny was such that communism lasted a few years after Tarkovsky's death, but when Mungiu started making films at the age of thirty-four, Ceaușescu's regime had been demolished and communism was abolished. The territory in which Mungiu lived was distant from communism in terms of time. From his point of view, the daily relations of life in Romania during the years of Ceausescu's rule seemed not only terrifying, but also silly and ridiculous. What makes the comedy of Tales from the Golden Age, is the natural perception of completely unnatural conditions under the control of ideology, and the display of stupid everyday situations that had been formed either as a result of continuous and blindfolded compliance with unreasonable government regulations or as the result of escaping from these regulations. It is said that after the overthrow of Ceausescu, a report was published in Bucharest about an old worker who admitted that he ate a banana with the skin for the first time because he had never seen a banana before and did not know that he should peel it before eating it! This report, in line with the previous double design, can be funny or tearful, depending on the perspective of the reader!

Mungiu did not like the Romanian cinema of the 1990s and believed that following the collapse and eruption of the charged energies, a kind of politicization has come to dominate this cinema, for which it is more important to talk about the "system" than how to tell a simple story and create believable situations. The "reality" of Romania had not had the chance to be screened until the emergence of a trend called "New Wave". Although the communist governments found "realism" to be an acceptable method, what they meant by this ideology was to express the desired reality of the party and not to depict the outside world, as it is. The extreme realism that Mungiu and his contemporaries embraced for more than a decade was a response to the need to create a tangible world, like a missing link.

Realism and the Romanian New Wave

In the comedy 12:08 East of Bucharest by Corneliu Porumboiu, on the occasion of the 16th anniversary of the revolution, it is supposed to celebrate the events of December 89 in a live television program. One of the guests of the program claims that on the day of the fall of Ceaușescu, he was the leader of the demonstration, which played a significant role in the historical-revolutionary developments of Romania. One by one, the audience comes on the line to remind that the guest of program is an ignorant drunkard, whose words should not be taken seriously because they witnessed the rally on the same day, shortly after Ceaușescu's escape, so there was neither an epic nor a heroism; Little by little, even the origin of the event is being questioned: "Was there basically a revolution at work or not?". Porumboiu's film contains the essence of the youth of the Romanian New Wave; Even when faced with an inherently mythical and epic arena like the revolution, he wants to be realistic and frank; On the one hand, he doubts the principle that the political developments in Romania were entirely the result of the will of the revolutionaries, and on the other hand, he shows that the outcome of this revolution is not glorious, and more or less is the same as before! In the images recorded by the new wave of post-communist Romania, traces of communism can still be seen everywhere: in job abuses (California Dreamin' by Cristian Nemescu), in unconstitutional laws (Police, Adjective by Porumboiu), in bribery and institutionalized domination (Child's Pose by Calin Peter Netzer and Graduation by Mungiu). A movie like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu by depicting the eroding bureaucracy and the worthlessness of life and body and human dignity in Romania, convince the viewer that this country has not yet passed communism. The new wave is not caught by the post-revolutionary optimism. It tries to awaken the conscience of the inhabitants of this land due to the unfavorable current situation and constantly reminds them of their individual responsibility. At the beginning of the new millennium, the young Romanian filmmakers were driven towards a kind of cinema which at its core craved the tradition of neorealists and was influenced by Dogma 95 and filmmakers such as Michael Haneke and the Dardenne brothers, and by synthesizing these all they formed their own desired and unique realism; A brutal and implicit realism, which proves that the Romanian people still do not enjoy life; They just tolerate it.

In The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, in contrary to the macro-revolutionary-political works, Cristi Puiu portrays a common man and deals with an issue that may happen to any citizen at any moment: an old man who is not feeling well calls the emergency so that they come and help. We do not know much about him and his past. Only his flesh is important. The audience "witnesses" how this suffering body is passed from hand to hand between hospitals and decomposes. In the Puiu’s mise-en-scène, there is no light or music, and everything is used in a truly cruel way to capture the pulse of the old man's daily life and convey his resentment. After initial trials and errors and scattered successes, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu with its strange execution obsession was a great leap and achievement for Romanian cinema and became a lasting model from which many prominent works of the new wave emerged; The most prominent of them is 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days by Cristian Mungiu.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days have Rossellini and Hitchcock together; On the one hand, its overall structure is justified by realist motives, and on the other hand, every moment seems dramatic and on the verge of disaster. Although it tries to recreate the rhythm of real life and its signs are directed to the information of the outside world, its structure is based on the suspense and attractions of the thriller. This approach has defamiliarized some generic materials (for example, the audience waits until the end for the knife that Otilia stole from Mr. Bebe's suitcase to be used somewhere, or for Mr. Bebe to return to the hotel to get his ID card back), and also given a documentary and believable effect to the dramatic parts of the film. The events of the film take place in the last years of Ceausescu. Romania's indebted government needs to expand its industry and workforce to pay off its loans. So, the workers of the future must be produced and reproduced, even if there is no father/husband; The era when abortion was prohibited. In such an era, the "mother-worker" model is more acceptable than the "mother-wife" model from the official point of view and has a patriotic meaning, but Găbița wants to get rid of the fetus in her stomach.

In the opening sequence, the long shot and the handheld camera of Mungiu give the audience the opportunity to walk through the corridors of the student dormitory like a visitor to a museum, visit its corners and experience the mood of life in the last years of the communist regime. Side events and short sections of students' daily life create a detailed and rich background regarding an era. The hostel remains a full-fledged black market where the dominant action is trading. Outside the dormitory, everything has a price. In front of a shrewd man like Mr. Bebe, if money is present, the work will proceed, if not, the body should be auctioned. He knows the ups and downs of his illegal job well. He has this job thank to "System". So, contrary to what has been said many times about it, it is not a symbol of communism; It is its product. Mungiu does not see the need to draw the coordinates of an inefficient and repressive structure, to present obvious political factors. Repression means the black market itself and the dominance of trading over human relations; It means dead and colorless spaces and bored, grumpy and unsmiling people; It means conversations devoid of respect and full of scrutiny; It means secrecy and pervasive suspicion. Mungiu's mise-en-scène throws us into this dark world. At all times we find ourselves in the heart of events; In the tracking shots, we keep pace with Otilia and see the world through the lens of a camera that is at the same level as our eyes. It stands and sits with Otilia. At the family gathering, it stands right in front of her to catch our eyes to her. Except for Otilia, everyone is outside the frame. We only hear their words as if they were reduced to meaningless sounds. In the tracking shots at night, we experience the terror of being under surveillance along with Otilia. Every moment we are watching the incident and everything is scary to our eyes. The scene, while being real, has a subjective feeling. She, who is wandering in the dark streets to get rid of the fetus, assumes every illusion and fantasy as reality, and the street is full of ghosts that are more real than the passers-by.

In the end, we find out that most of the fears were unreal. There was no violence that required the stolen knife; Găbița's operation was easier than expected; In Otilia's absence, Găbița didn't get hurt, neither did Mr. Bebe return to the hotel, and the final mission, that is, the disappearance of fetus, was completed without any problems. Even though there was no acute problem, fear and deadly pressure threatens Otilia and Găbița every moment (and weighs heavily on the chest of us, as audiences); The danger is always around them and the feeling of being guilty has not left them for a second. Mungiu's frames are a cinematic interpretation of living in constant fear; Whether the source of this fear is real or not. And that's what communism means.

Behind the horrifying world of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the shadow of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu can be recognized. Regardless of the common formal arrangements (natural light, removal of music, naturalistic performances, limited time period of the plot and temporal-spatial sequence to induce continuity), in terms of the morphology of the narrative, both films are night journeys. If in Puiu's film, the nurse knocks on every door to bring the suffering old man to a safe place, in Mungiu's film, Otilia Is like a soldier who must hit the darkness to save her commander. In the final stillness and banquet of Otilia and Găbița, the same feeling prevails as in Lazaresco's ritual of washing; A kind of relief from the constant struggle, which, of course, is loose and will not last. After the incident that happened between Otilia and Mr. Bebe, there is no guarantee that the tragedy will not be repeated for Otilia this time. Maybe her final look conveys this idea. It seems that she is looking at us and wants us to be witnesses.

Beyond the Hills

Beyond the Hills, in spite of being dark and gloomy, functions as a comedy. When a frightened nun arrives for the umpteenth time to talk about Alina's new acts of savagery, or when the people of the monastery, thinking that the devil has penetrated into the girl's body, gather over her and torture her unintentionally, the comic aspects of the film appear. The priest's seriousness, the extreme terror of the nuns and their medieval perception of Alina's aggressive behavior (who is naturally nervous and disturbed like any other failed lover) have led to the formation of a grotesque situation that combines fear and laughter. Here, like comedies that use time as a tool to create spectacular and ridiculous situations, "incompatibility" is the central issue. Just as in science-fictions based on time machines, the disharmony between people of two different eras leads to the creation of humorous moments, from the conflict between the brainless inhabitants of the monastery and Alina in Beyond the Hills, there is a sense of absurdity that somehow carries the idea of "asynchronicity". In the wide shot at the beginning of the film that shows Alina and Voichita climbing the hill, there is a pale perspective of time; It is as if the two of them are going back in time as they move away from the city (we soon find out that the monastery does not even have electricity!). According to the relations between knowledge and power, Alina is a "patient" in the eyes of the hospital staff and "carrier of the devil's soul" in the eyes of the monastery residents. While those hermits consider her suffering to be a punishment for sin, the urban doctors consider this suffering to be a disorder that can be treated with medicine without the intervention of religion. She is treated in both places, but under different patterns of "knowledge", and the concept of her condition is transformed by changing power structures and relations. The scary thing is that if we travel to the "time" of the monastics and interpret the conditions based on their primitive "knowledge", we will be convinced that they torture Alina with good intentions! From this point of view, it is not unreasonable to consider Beyond the Hills as a dark comedy like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. The body of the character of both films is crushed under the gears of the power structure; This structure is the Romanian health system on one side and the Orthodox Church on the other side. Should we call Mungiu a materialistic filmmaker? A clear answer cannot be given. In Beyond the Hills, the church is an excuse, not a goal. In general, in order not to be marginalized by the strengthening of science, the old principles and rituals tend to find new interpretations and similar parallels in new cultures and to be related to today from a social point of view. Therefore, it can be said that Mungiu's attack is not against the church, but against an isolated system that is frozen in time and does not move forward with the pace of the time. It seems that he is still talking about communism in Beyond the Hills. All the components are gathered: a closed and uninformed environment with strict rules, away from technology and luxury, the virtue of poverty and equality in misery, and most importantly, the presence of a holy and powerful father who sees the western world as going to ruin and in the possession of Satan. The film shows how the difference (individuality) turns Alina into a factor of disrupting the integrity of the monastery and what consequences it has for her.

At the police station, the united mass finally believe that they are nothing more than an oblivious and insignificant minority and that the scope of "thought" goes beyond the narrow and blurred framework of a monastery. In the end, Voichita, wearing a colored dress for the first time, is no longer similar to those around her. In her final look, one can read faith that has been shaken and beliefs that have lost their stability. The slap of the reality has awakened her and made the "faith" that was her whole life, nothing in front of her eyes. She will not return to the monastery.

Graduation

Graduation has been compared to Asghar Farhadi's The salesman. It is interesting that both films (which were made in the same year) have put the issue of rape and its consequences as the main core, but what is more interesting is the completely different approach of the two filmmakers towards the subject. The salesman has a desire to search and discover and come to certainty, but in Graduation, the search becomes a secondary issue due to a more important goal. The influence of the Romanian new wave on Farhadi's cinema can be a reason for a comparative study, but it’s worth mentioning the common stylistic elements such as hand-held camera, removal of music and naturalistic performances, and the use of police drama aspects in a realistic context of About Elly is similar with Mungiu's traits in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. On the other hand, it should be said that after the global success of A Separation, Farhadi's cinema became a model whose scope of influence is significant both in homeland and abroad (including on the Romanian New Wave itself and a film such as Child's Pose). From this point of view, is it possible to go beyond the thematic comparison between the Graduation and The Salesman and read Mungiu's film as a response to A Separation? The signs are obvious: in the center of both films, a couple has reached the bottom line and is on the verge of separation, thinking about the future of their only daughter. In A Separation, it’s the mother who wants her daughter to live somewhere other than her mother's land, and in Graduation, it’s the father who has such a wish. The occurrence of the incident disturbs the affairs of both families and becomes an excuse for the camera to leave the confines of the house and the small family and focus on the ups and downs of the “big family” by exploring the realm of the police and the judicial and bureaucratic system.The commonalities of the two films from the perspective of location are also interesting and most of their events take place either in the interior of the house or in the hospital, school and judicial spaces (the frame that shows the sad and silent man and woman in a lonely corridor opposite each other comes directly from the end of A Separation). The common background of the two films draws the viewer's attention to their different purposes. When the central topic is "immigration", it is clear that the films are talking about their land. Simin says that there are unpleasant circumstances, but she does not have a clear explanation for the judge's question: "Which circumstances?" In Graduation, however, Romeo constantly talks to his daughter, Eliza, about his past mistakes to encourage her more and more to emigrate. He says that he returned to Romania 20 years ago with the end of communism to rebuild it, but he was crude and made a mistake: "This land cannot be repaired." He does not know that his temperament is the product of the communist era. He is selfish, monopolistic and domineering, and as a father, he does not care about his daughter's individuality and demands her future to make up for his own past. He is following Eliza like a shadow every moment; he is involved in everything she does and constantly reminds her that he wants her salvation. The relationship between this father and daughter is not unlike the relationship between the people of the monastery and Alina in Beyond the Hills! In the scene where Eliza goes to the police station to identify the suspect, Romeo's image is somehow reflected in the glass in front of the girl, creating a ghostly image of the father among the accused. He will never understand the condition of the girl after the abuse that happened to her. The only thing that matters to him is that Eliza gets the grades she needs to get a scholarship at any cost, even at the cost of breaking the law. Romeo is from the same generation that spent their youth in dormitories of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; Those who lawlessness is institutionalized in many of them under the rigid rules of the communist government! Even after its collapse, communism continues to live on in the minds of the likes of Romeo. On the one hand, he complains about the deep-rooted and widespread corruption of his country, and on the other hand, by putting the deputy mayor's name on the waiting list for a liver transplant, with the intention of getting the passing grade for Eliza, he is actually fueling this corruption himself. While he tries to be in control of everything, Mungiu sets a path before his feet that leads to confusion (this is the breaking point that brings Graduation away from Farhadi and closer to Haneke and Hidden); Romeo neither finds out who the victim was nor finds the cause of breaking the windows; In all the moments when he thought he was out of sight, he was actually under surveillance, in the way that his secret relationship with Sandra and his jobbery with the deputy mayor was revealed; He can neither buy score for Eliza, nor break the relationship up between her and her boyfriend. He has been a loser in all cases and has not reached anywhere. So why should we think that he is truthful? Why should Eliza follow his advice? Despite the bitterness, Mungiu's film ends with hope (and unlike A Separation, the signs of the daughter staying are stronger than her departure); And hope means the recognition of Eliza's individuality. The girl stands in front of her father and says that she wants to decide whether to stay or leave. Individuality, this missing feature of the communist system, is slowly emerging in Eliza and her contemporaries. The final sequence of the Graduation is one of the few moments in which Mungiu's cinema shows glimpses of vitality in Romanian society: the father eventually retreats and stands aside for his young daughter to prove him wrong.

They Survived and Even Laughed

In the introduction to the book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Slavenka Drakulić compares communism to a tunnel of terror that until the Eastern Bloc residents were trapped in it, they saw the party as the source of all their fears and pains, and they should get out of it to find that their lives would not be better by changing of the regime and it was they who must take responsibility and build their land. According to her, in Eastern Europe, communism still continues in the actions, faces, and thoughts of the people, and there is a long way to go until its end, because even if it is abandoned overnight as a method of government or political power, the people who have been under its supervision does not change easily. This truth has been perfectly reflected in the cinema of Mungiu and most Romanian New Wave filmmakers. They are not very interested in the term "new wave" and prefer to be called "new generation"; Maybe because the label "wave" is inherently associated with a connected whole and can ignore the individuality and distinction of people. However, it cannot be denied that even if the word "wave" refers to unity and homogeneity, it is more appropriate to use it for Romanian youth than, for example, for representatives of colorful and diverse Korean contemporary cinema. Whatever it is, Romania is a land where they have called for unity for years and engraved it as a habit and value in the collective unconscious. Even if any word indicating interrelationship, has lost its meaning in the eyes of the new wave filmmakers. After all, the existence of common sensitivities, styles and preoccupations among this generation is clear and obvious. They have stayed in their land and see its bitterness and shortcomings, but their eyes are on the future. Graduation’s last scene can be considered a metaphor for this generation: determined young people, with minds full of passion for living, are standing side by side and waiting for their image to be recorded.