THE MOROMETE FAMILY by Stere Gulea

Translating a by-gone world

We are continuing our efforts to make the Romanian cinema heritage accessible to the international audience. So today, 35 years after the release of the film adaptation of „The Moromete Family”, thanks to the Cinepub team, the film is completed with an English subtitle and comes in a new resolution, unique online. 

„Moromeții” is the Romanian film that has completed and amplified the echoes of one of the most representative novels in our literature, the novel by the same name signed by writer Marin Preda. A film with a wide social span, about the dissolution of an entire social class (the peasants) and of a traditional lifestyle which will be lost forever. Through Moromete this world is crystallised to be sent to the future, as in a time capsule. The actors playing the main characters are brilliant, and they fully deserve their awards and ovations.

“Moromeții” (meaning the Moromete family) is an adaptation of the first volume of a modern classic of Romanian literature, bearing the same name, published in two volumes (1955 and 1967) by Marin Preda, who is rightly considered as one of the best post-WW2 Romanian novelists. Ilie Moromete faces constant problems: his sister’s nagging, taxes and the work in the fields, while his older sons, almost grown-up, are now showing signs of rebellion. The book on which the film is based famously starts with the phrase “time showed endless patience to the people”. Yet, in a period heralding irreversible changes, in between the two World Wars, the Moromete family is facing break-up. Ilie Moromete, a real ‘pater familias’, magisterially played by Victor Rebengiuc, feels this, and tries to cling to a way of life which – now we know – is doomed both by the impending war and by the communist regime the Soviets will install.

Time no longer has any patience and cracks have started to appear in the mesh of the traditional peasant family. Film director Stere Gulea, taking over from Marin Preda, has managed to convey, through the character of Ilie Moromete, the archetype of the Romanian peasant.

Stere Gulea notes about the film: “As regards the screening of this masterpiece, the problem that has concerned me was not that of the personality and originality infusion. Not just I, but also the D.P, the leading actor and the other collaborators, we all had the same concern: to put ourselves in the service of the book, trying to transpose it in its spirit, as loyally as we could. The term „service” as far as a literature masterpiece is concerned, did not give us the feeling of being subordinates, or that our own Ego had been diminished somehow. That is why we wanted the film to be as simple as possible. I almost wanted that the camera should not be felt, and that only the world of the novel should be as is, as authentic as possible.” (From the Presentation Notebook)

Stere Gulea’s project, as far as „Moromeții” is concerned, has been accomplished. Most critics and viewers noticed the naturalness close to perfection of Moromete’s world in the director’s film. Stere Gulea wanted to closely follow Marin Preda’s book and to make a classical film, by the model of Liviu Ciulei’s productions. He was successful with both undertakings. „Moromeții” is one of the Romanian films that have followed a fiction novel most closely, aiming to be a filmic vehicle for a universe so well-shaped and with so many specific elements as that of the Moromete family that it worked as a perfectly self-sufficient world.

The dialogues and the verbal expressions are rendered almost identically; everything in Stere Gulea’s film is “Morometian” in the same way as it is “Morometian” in the book. Apparently just as conscious as its creators, the character  Ilie Moromete, „the peasant-philosopher” as he has been called, does everything he can to keep his world intact. For Ilie, the peasant is a land owner and a governor of his own household, family and world. Unfortunately times change quickly, and he has to accept a new member in his life, who will take over the reins of his destiny: the State. Neither the preceptor, as a representative of the new structures, nor the mayor manage to convince Moromete to accept this new authority.

“I said adaptation: it is too little. Without going too far from the letter of the novel, the director won the lottery that contained the spirit of Preda’s literary work. Following the picture raster and the unmistakable psychological atmosphere of the village universe in the novel, an independent piece is created – a filmic one, freestanding, but covering the cluster of meanings, beyond the events. Maybe this is where the great force of Stere Gulea’s film resides.” (Bedros Horasangian – www.aarc.ro )

The only thing that convinces Ilie that times have truly changed is his own children’s betrayal as they embrace other options than the ones that lay at the basis of Moromete’s existence: money to the detriment of land. Stere Gulea and Victor Rebengiuc’s art gives its highest measure here, in the way in which they render the fall into himself of the main character, when he understands that the loss of his own world is an irreversible phenomenon.

A fundamental piece in the history of Romanian cinema, and a must in terms of international availability on our platform.