CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'

PLENTY of unfinished novels - Gogol's Dead Souls, Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon- have gained some critical traction, but it is unusual for an uncompleted film to secure significant recognition. When a director keels over on set, the financiers tend to trash the rushes, phone the insurers and make ready to bathe in Champagne.

It is, thus, intriguing to consider the posthumous feature debut from once-promising Romanian tyro Cristian Nemescu. The director died a few weeks after shooting ended, but gained a sliver of immortality when California Dreamin'was declared the winner of the Un Certain Regard section at last year's Cannes Film Festival.

Weaving a satirical farce around an actual incident from the Kosovo war, the film does have the feel of a work-in-progress about it. Weighing in at a hefty (not to say flabby) 155 minutes, the version that has made it into our cinemas suggests an understandable reluctance on the editor's part to trim one nanosecond of the late director's footage. Had Nemescu lived, he may have battered this rough cut into something a little less unwieldy.

Still, there is plenty to savour in this odd, cynical picture. Events spin out from the arrival of a platoon of US marines at a remote Romanian village in 1999. The troops, led by Armand Assante's impatient captain, are travelling to Kosovo by train, but, following a disagreement concerning documentation, the town's pernickety stationmaster halts their progress.

Tensions emerge. The mayor throws a festival to welcome the troops. The stationmaster's daughter romances one of the soldiers. Eventually, desperate to complete his mission, the captain begins fuelling insurrection among the town's hotheads.

Closer to the dark comedy of The Death of Mr Lazarescuthan to the bleak realism of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Nemescu's film confirms the confident advance of Romanian cinema. Weaving in occasional flashbacks to the second World War, California Dreamin' deftly balances moments of wild absurdity with cool meditations on the motivations behind America's foreign interventions.

Some of those ponderings are a tad unsophisticated, but this baggy, humane picture retains a rough integrity throughout, and stands as a stout elegy to its late instigator.