Authenticist Formulas
An atypical film in Stere Gulea’s filmography, starring Adela Popescu and Medeea Marinescu in a tense drama about a mother-daughter relationship marked by absence, resentment, and emotional fragility.
by Augustin Cupșa
Although only 17 years have passed since its release, this film requires some context for younger viewers. After the political upheavals of 1989, Romania, like all the countries of the Eastern Bloc, took a shortcut, crossing borders and fields toward the residential neighborhoods of the West. Stages of social development were skipped, democratic values and standards were reclaimed, and private initiative reemerged. The 1990s were wild, like a torrential downpour that broke the dams and scattered the people, laying the groundwork for a diaspora of several million Romanians—most of them overqualified, resourceful, and sufficiently terrified by the country’s politics to seize the window of opportunity before it closed again. By comparison, the 2000s seemed devoid of substance.
Romanian cinema reached its peak with the New Wave, which gained recognition at international film festivals. Instead, the film industry had to revolve around television networks, which dictated the rules of the game. The satellite dishes of the 1990s disappeared from rooftops, and private, national, local, neighborhood, or apartment-block channels — such as OTV — entered homes via cable. Following the artificial reporting of the years of wooden language, journalism underwent a malignant reversal: it was not reality that produced emotion, but rather the opposite — reality was dramatized according to the impressions of program directors. The 5:00 p.m. news turned daily life into a pocket-sized soap opera filled with crimes, betrayals, sex, and drugs. There was a sort of attempt to boost ratings during the break between two Brazilian soap operas. With these thoughts in mind, commercial film production tentatively turned toward an audience that resembled an alien to whom it had to explain, in sign language, what life was like in this corner of the world. This is how Romanian soap operas emerged, as well as the film intended to be a blockbuster — all cut from roughly the same cloth, largely featuring the same producers, actors, directors, and screenwriters.
Many established directors, now in the prime of their creative careers, found themselves facing this challenge. Stere Gulea first made a name for himself with “The Green Grass of Carpathians” (1977), based on a screenplay co-written with novelist Sorin Titel, after serving as assistant director on “Beyond the Sandcliffs”, Radu Gabrea’s adaptation of Nicolae Breban’s novel. This was followed by The Carpathian Castle (1981) and Bear’s Eyes (1983). Stere Gulea’s penchant for expansive literature stems from his early training as a philologist at the Faculty of Letters. After some preparatory work and exercises in cinematic technique, the rising director took on the film adaptation of “The Moromete Family”, Marin Preda’s novel, the cornerstone of Romanian literature in the second half of the 20th century. It was a well-deserved success, thanks to which Ilie Moromete, Maria, Nilă, Paraschiv, Achim, Niculae, Bălosu, and Stan Țugurlan took on faces in the collective imagination, and their lines became part of everyone’s vocabulary.
Then, just as in Preda’s novel, the world is turned upside down once again, and as if from a pit of strangers, new figures emerge and make their way to the forefront. After the revolution came the cult documentary “University Square – Romania” (1991, co-directed with Vivi Drăgan Vasile and Sorin Ilieșu), followed by two excellent feature films, “The Fox Hunter” (1993) and “State of Affairs” (1995), and a collaboration on the TV series “Hacker”. After dabbling in both politics and the management of TVR, Stere Gulea returned to feature films with “Weekend with my Mother”, produced toward the end of the decade, based on a screenplay by Vera Ion, an adaptation of her novel.
Just as in 2000s literature, film relied on the idea of delivering raw reality on the spot, without reflection or authorial processing (unlike in the case of Marin Preda’s “The Moromete Family”, where real events became literature more than 20 years after they took place, or in the work of other long-standing novelists) . The real-time dramatization of everyday life was the driving force behind the news, talk shows, evening programs, “Surprize, Surprize” (Surprises, Surprises), and even sports competitions or the weather segment. In the literature of the 2000s, the academic validation of this phenomenon came to be known as “authenticism”.
The film’s theme is all too familiar to us — Romanians leave to find work, abandon their children, and families fall apart. The subject is so common that it becomes the subject of a book written by one of the film’s supporting characters, who psychologically documents the situation that affects him personally. This is Felix (Florin Zamfirescu), the father of the teenage heroine — Cristina (Adela Popescu) — who lives in a foster family after her parents separated. It seems that Luiza (Medeea Marinescu) left for Spain when the child was three and a half years old, and the father, who became a university professor — even a vice-rector — shirked his paternal duties, even though he remained in Bucharest. In fact, the man, with his perpetually distracted air, suffers from a kind of academic schizoid disorder; he constantly loses touch with reality, preoccupied as he is with his career and academic power. He has a peculiar smile and chatters enthusiastically about psychological articles and books when he should be confronting the drama of his daughter, who has become addicted to heroin. He is so bizarre that when he meets the teenager for coffee, alongside Luiza, after many years, instead of taking the girl’s hand, he slips his own glossy-covered book between her fingers — most likely self-published by some obscure press. And when the girl pours all the venom of her abandonment in his face, he laughs awkwardly.
Instead, the mother is doing her utmost to get the girl back on the right track, even though she herself finds herself in a somewhat questionable offside position. In fact, pretty much all the characters have an uncertain outline and move with cautious anticipation, except when they smoke and stick their dicks in (a slang excess specific to 2000s-style authenticity). For example, Luiza, who left her daughter at three and a half years old in the care of her sister, Elena (Ecaterina Nazare), and Sandu (Ion Sapdaru), reappears 16 years later as if from another planet, deprived of means of communication or transportation, and doesn’t know what her daughter looks like, even though she claims she kept in constant contact with her and sent money home.
Furthermore, in addition to her financial success, it seems the woman has also undergone a structural transformation—much like Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion”, she has become exceedingly refined, so that her return to her former environment, despite her best efforts, creates a constant aesthetic contrast. Finally, of all the characters, Luiza seems the most committed to her role, thanks to the effort of Medeea Marinescu, who tries to fill the gap between the abbreviated lines detached from natural emotions — such as worry, fear, guilt, or love — and anything the viewer might label as pathos (the concept opposed to 2000-style authenticity). In short, according to the paradigm, narrative events must be sensational, but the protagonists’ involvement must remain detached, chill, or no panic, man. The result, however, feels more like a brightly painted roller coaster at an amusement park on the outskirts of Bucharest; the viewer feels confused and short-changed.
Once in town, Luiza, with her newly acquired distinction, finds herself caught up in a whirlwind of terrifying situations. Her brother-in-law Sandu is a sinister brute whom she suspects of having abused her daughter, while her sister Elena has suffered a stroke and is out of touch with reality, and their little girl is no more than 8 years old and speaks with difficulty under pressure, so, through this device, the author finds himself spared from narrative details and logic. The situation looks dire in a city morally and financially ruined — Cristina and “Glonț” (Tudor Aaron Istodor) deal and use injectable drugs, smoke cannabis, and chain-smoke in subway restrooms and rented rooms, while almost all of her friends are “spoiled” girls who drink themselves senseless in clubs and hook up with older men in cars.
In stark contrast stands the traditional Romanian village, with its wooden houses and strings of onions hanging in the porches, the fresh scent of the earth, and the shade of the forest, where Grandfather (Gheorghe Dinică) still leans on his rake and gazes into the distance. The timelessness of the Romanian village embodied by this man is so eternal that he is not surprised when people leave or arrive, not even when his own children, long gone, everything flows by in a rush, he goes about his household chores and returns from hunting with a rabbit caught by the ears and a rifle in the other hand, to feed his family that has sprung up out of nowhere.
In this oasis of patriarchal tranquility, Luiza brings her daughter — after a hastily arranged detox — to Alexandru Obregia Hospital in Bucharest, simply and humorously telling her that “the heroin thing isn’t okay”. Strangely enough, though, the intervention works; mother and daughter finally grow closer, and it seems the story will take a sensitive turn and explore this fragile relationship at length. It doesn’t go that way. The teenager, in turn, has a daughter abandoned at an orphanage after her biological father died in a motorcycle accident, so the two must return to Bucharest. Naturally, Cristina runs into Glonț again, and that’s how she ends up with Johnny (Andi Vasluianu), a major drug dealer to whom the poor guy owes about 10,000 euros, so he’s willing to hand over his girlfriend’s child in exchange.
Well, it seems a bit much, but that’s how it is. There are only about 8 minutes of film left, and the story takes a new turn. Stere Gulea is a director versatile and skilled enough to handle the subject matter, but the narrative has to rely on major gaps and inconsistencies in meaning to move toward the intended resolution. Johnny seems to have entered a lucid mystical delirium after prolonged consumption of bizarre substances and is in contact with Edwards (Răzvan Vasilescu), whom we recognize as Luiza’s seatmate from the beginning of the film, when the plane from Spain was flying over Bucharest and the two were admiring the multicolored lights.
The ending is harsh and shouldn’t be spoiled; it’s one of the many possibilities that narrative improvisation offers, chosen almost at random. However, this might be the advantage of watching the film all the way through — the cascade of surprises that, from a certain point onward, unfold unintentionally and aimlessly.
Premiere of the week: Weekend with my Mother by Stere Gulea, Thursday, May 28, at 9:30 p.m., on CINEPUB.RO
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