Last night I reacquainted myself with Corneliu Poromboiu’s delightful 12:08 East of Bucharest (A fost sau n-a fost?, 2006), a practically zero-budget Romanian comedy that scores spectacular value for money in the laughs department. I’d previously seen it last year, when it opened the Sarajevo Film Festival, screening in a gigantic open-air venue to an audience of 2,500 who, judging from the loud and enthusiastic reaction, enjoyed it as much as I did. I was expecting a Soho press show attended by a hundredth of that crowd to have a very different atmosphere, but it went down very well there too.
I stress the comedy element because Romania isn’t exactly renowned for light entertainment – at least in terms of the films that get international exposure. By far the highest-profile release in Britain to date is Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Moartea domnului Lazarescu, 2005), about the final hours of an elderly alcoholic undergoing the not-so-tender care of the Bucharest equivalent of the NHS. Brilliant though it was (my Sight & Sound thumbs-up is here), it wasn’t exactly a rollicking night out, and this year’s surprise Cannes Palme d’Or winner, Cristian Mungiu’s illegal-abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamini si 2 zile, 2007), sounds more gruelling still. Even Radu Muntean’s The Paper Will Be Blue (Hîrtia va fi albastrã, 2006), which I also saw at Sarajevo, stresses the harsher, more violent and unpredictable side of the Romanian revolution, though it also works as a straightforward thriller.
By contrast, 12:08 East of Bucharest is a situation comedy in the most literal sense. Fully half the running time is taken up with a single sequence in a TV studio, with three people filmed head-on by a single wobbly camera. The one in the middle is Virgil Jderescu (Teodor Corban), increasingly harassed presenter-cum-station owner (like the film, it’s a low-budget operation), who rapidly comes to rue his plan to commemorate the sixteenth anniversary of the fall of former dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu by hosting a talk show featuring two people who claimed to have played an active part in the revolution. Neither of his guests was a first choice (most people have better things to do in the run-up to Christmas) and one in particular turns out to remember events quite differently to the people who ring in, their responses ranging from denial to abuse to libel threats.
Although often very funny indeed (with Mircea Andreescu stealing practically every shot he’s in as a bored part-time Santa Claus, whiling away the recriminations on the other side of the screen by making origami boats), the film has a serious point at base, which is that when great events happen in our backyard, our natural inclination is to exaggerate our part in them to the point where historians are left tearing their hair out. It was a particularly apposite choice to open a festival like Sarajevo, where practically all the locals in the audience would have had vivid memories of what they themselves did during their own recent historical upheaval – and it was clear from their reaction that the film was striking more than a few chords.