Yes, they had Pepsi
"The Graduates" signified a pop movement and subsequently a source of nostalgia for several waves of teenagers
There never seems to be a better time to revisit a movie from the "The Graduates" series, today when we've come to debate the need for history, geography or Latin classes, when students film their teachers in bad positions or their classmates crammed in the back toilet, bullying has become a national sport, and botox is spreading through high schools faster than the flu. I wondered if it wouldn't be a clear enough movie, certainly devoid of licentious language or scenes forbidden to audiences under 12, with some life lessons, to watch with Ioana, my almost 8-year-old daughter. I warned her that the film captures excessively suave or artificial behaviors and relationships between people because it was conceived in a period of severe political and social constraints, in a time of ideological and language censorship, etc., etc.
They had Pepsi?!, was the first remark at one of the opening scenes.
Yes, things weren't so different nowadays, I had to correct myself.
Further on I had to explain to her about the uniforms of the students, about the imperative to cut their hair "according to the rules", about the address "comrade", about the Dacia cars that are repeated on the boulevards of Bucharest as in an optical illusion and about the generosity of parking spaces, but I didn't feel in any moment (neither towards myself nor towards the film) that I was doing it in a condescending way or as an excuse for an intensely directed naivety, of which, by the way, I was never a part. "The Graduates" signified a pop movement and subsequently a source of nostalgia for several waves of teenagers, I didn't catch any of them, so in my case the attraction must be explained by something else.
"Test Paper" is the third in the series, after "Confessions of Love" (1985) and "The Graduates" (1986), with the same team - director Nicolae Corjos and screenwriter George Șovu - and most of the actors of the first two parts. Once again we have in front of us Mr. Gavrilescu "Socrates" (Ion Caramitru), a philosophy teacher, and Mr. Baldovin "Isoscel" (Tamara Buciuceanu-Botez), with whom we have Anca (Mădălina Pop), daughter of "Socrates", a high school student, and Ms. Luminița Cernea (Diana Lupescu), a Romanian language teacher, a newcomer. This time, the stars of Liceenilor - Dana (Oana Sârbu), Mihai (Ștefan Bănică Jr) and Ionică (Mihai Constantin) - are relegated to supporting actors and appear in only a few scenes with their band or in group sequences, which for many fans is a source of frustration.
Yet these changes bring a tactical advantage. The plot is more deeply drawn in this story than in the other parts and has a higher stakes - the education of youth, the lesson of life, the building of morality and purpose that goes beyond the perimeter of a teenage love story.
Otherwise, it's fall again, a new start of school and another romance is on the horizon, this time between Anca and Doru. A new Prom promises to be held, Stela Enache sings a song in the vein of Italian slams (good for hipster parties), and the band The Graduates repeats their hit from previous editions. In the fever of the preparations, the story of the two consumes the ups and downs of their love affair, the quarrels of vanity, hurt sensibilities and ellipses of communication, which will find their resolution in a round and inclusive finale like a "photograph for eternity". In the chancellery, however, another conflict, one of substance, unfolds between Socrates and Isosceles. The math teacher is an advocate of a Spartan model of education, while Socrates is closer to a rhetoric befitting his nickname, empathy and closeness to his students. If we look at an American commercial movie like "Good Will Hunting", made only 10 years later, also about the relationship between student and teacher and the same sentimental meanderings of the age, we can say that Socrates is truly ahead of our time. His attempts to convey something profound to the young are "In life you have to stay clean" and "Now, go on, go!" repeated in any context, possibly with a slap on the cheek.
I didn't understand why parents slap their children, Ioana told me at the end.
It was a different time, I replied, and contradicted myself again.
If there's anything that can be taught to children by watching this movie, it would be about how the wooden language of a political era can become the language of the state, so deeply screwed into people's minds that it is still spoken today, about how censorship excavates natural emotions and amputates natural gestures of closeness, about how, in an autocratic regime, two sentimental partners seem more awkward than the stuffed foxes in the dioramas of the Antipa Museum, workmates instead of lovers, and last but not least about how repressed people become mannequins in a territory ruled by a mouthpiece. It's interesting that all these harmful effects of dictatorship are not seen directly in the movie, but through a gestalt mechanism - after you cut out the geometric body you can still identify it by the outline left. I am thinking that perhaps many of those involved in the ideal raised by "The Graduates" totally believed in it and identified with it, despite the fact that the corresponding years in reality were downright Orwellian in Romania.
Perhaps therein lies the unnatural and shallow beauty of the movie, that it has such an overdose of candor that it can absorb all the genuine miseries of life.
(Augustin Cupșa, cinepub.ro)
This week's premiere: Test Paper by Nicolae Corjos, Thursday, February 13, at 9:00 p.m EEST, on CINEPUB.RO
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