At the forefront of a new wave of Romanian film-makers who survived the Ceausescu regime, Cristian Mungiu is now ready to present the funny side of a grim era, he tells DONALD CLARKE
CRISTIAN MUNGIU doesn’t look much like the figurehead of a major cinematic movement. Round-faced, dressed in a neat sweatshirt and casual trousers, he comes across like a visiting postgraduate student or a particularly articulate secondary-school teacher. Jean-Luc Godard would have stormed into the room amid a cloud of poisonous Marxist vapours. Federico Fellini would have been delivered in a sedan chair by tattooed cherubs. Mungiu plonks himself down at the bar and begins chatting in staggeringly fluent English.
Yet, Mungiu is, indeed, the standard-bearer for one of the less likely cinematic waves of the past few decades. When 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, his teeth-grindingly naturalistic tale of abortion in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2007, the world's more alert film-goers acknowledged Mungiu's home country as a new powerhouse in art cinema. 4 Monthshad been proceeded by Cristi Puiu's sardonic The Death of Mr Lazarescuand Corneliu Porumboiu's bitter 12:08 East of Bucharest. It was followed by Cristian Nemescu's California Dreamin'and Corneliu Porumboiu's upcoming Police Adjective. Now Mungiu offers us a terrific omnibus picture entitled Tales from the Golden Age.
That’s a great many fine pictures from a country that had hitherto not figured too prominently in dictionaries of world cinema. Nobody saw it coming.
“I am asked about this a great deal,” he says. “And the answer is not all that clear. Why do you think it happened?”
Well, these things usually happen after a group of bright pals begin formulating ideas as students or academics or critics.
"It wasn't so much like that with us," he says. "We didn't all get together and plan this. I think it started as a spontaneous reaction against the Romanian films that were made in our youth during the old regime. They were so unrealistic we thought we can do better than this, anybodycould do better than this. That overlapped with public money being available for a director's first film."
Mungiu and his colleagues inadvertently evolved a humanistic style that focused on the grubby details of everyday life in Romania during (for the most part) the dying days of communism. The ironically titled Tales from the Golden Agecould be viewed as a boisterous summation of their efforts so far. Written by Mungiu, but co-directed with four less well-known compatriots, the film develops five urban legends from the era into mordant, grimly hilarious parables. The citizens of a rural town manoeuvre themselves into catastrophe while preparing for the arrival of a senior official; party media monitors doctor a photograph of Ceausescu to make him seem the same height as western imperialist Valéry Giscard d'Estaing; urban-dwellers contemplate the best way to kill a pig; and so forth.
“We call them ‘urban myths’, but it’s a bit different to what that phrase means elsewhere,” Mungiu says. “In Romania we believe the urban myths to be true. But the details are expanded and differences creep in – ‘Oh, this happened to my neighbour’, that sort of thing. I know three of these stories to be true, the one about Ceausescu’s hat, for example. I talked to the editor of the paper.”
Mungiu and his colleagues had to pluck the final five stories from a sheaf of unlikely yarns. They were keen that the tales had resonance beyond their surface oddness.
“It was important to pick stories that said something about the system,” he says. “They had to be interesting, but they had to say something about the effect of communism on ordinary people.
“The one about the pig, for example, actually appeared in a police magazine. There was a warning section at the back saying, ‘Don’t do like these people did’.”
FANS OF 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Dayscould be forgiven for assuming that Mungiu had deliberately set out to offer a comedic complement to that extraordinarily sombre contemporary classic. Yet it seems that the earlier film, in which a university student travels to a damp hotel for an abortion, was conceived at much the same time as Tales from the Golden Age. Mungiu felt, however, that unleashing the comic piece first might give the wrong impression.
"I planned it as part of a trilogy and I knew the other films might be comedies," he says. "I didn't intend 4 Monthsto be first, but once the scripts were ready I paused. I didn't want the first film I released in this series to be a comedy because then people might think I thought living under the regime was a joke. I didn't want young people thinking, 'Oh, it looks so funny, I wish I lived then'. In reality it was not fun."
Quite so – 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Daysmakes that very clear indeed. Yet Mungiu, now a fresh 41, admits that he fared better than many in those grim years. Born to a family of bright sparks – his elder sister, Alina, is a distinguished political scientist – he spent a few years working as a journalist during the pathetic, desperate dying days of the regime.
“We were lucky in that, on the paper I wrote for, we didn’t have to write about Ceausescu. We couldn’t write anything bad about him, of course. But we didn’t have to publish his picture in every issue.”
A graduate in English literature, he began studying film in 1994 because it seemed the best way of satisfying his "desire to tell stories". As he explains it, the availability of foreign films waxed and waned throughout his childhood. There were periods in the 1970s when American films were available, but later, as the money dried up, cinemas became increasingly empty. Eventually, when the video age arrived, illegal copies of every mainstream film imaginable began drifting into Romania, but it was not until the 1990s that Mungiu was able to immerse himself fully in the world's classics. (Folk of a certain age will be amused to note that one of the characters in Tales from the Golden Ageenjoys watching the vintage American TV series, Daktari, on television.) It sounds, indeed, like a pretty wretched era to live through. Watch Mungiu's films and you will search in vain for anybody who thinks the regime anything other than a morass of ineptitude and corruption. Were loyal followers of Ceausescu and his wretched wife, Elena, truly so thin on the ground?
“Yes, I think so,” Mungiu says. “People really hated it. You did encounter some people who benefited from the system, and they felt differently. If you were from a farm where you slept with all your brothers in one room and you were brought to the city to work in a factory, you maybe approved of the regime. What did freedom mean to you when you had grown up with nothing and now had something?”
It would, in those years, have seemed inconceivable that a young Romanian journalist would, two decades later, become one of the world's most celebrated film-makers. Yet, by 2007, that is what had transpired. When Mungiu made 4 Months, his second feature, did he have any inkling that it would become a critical sensation?
“No, not at all,” he says. “I knew it was strong. But you never know how people will feel when they are sitting in their chair in the cinema. I certainly never suspected that it would have this critical acclaim. The best thing was just getting it into Cannes. Then when we got it into competition it was something else. Suddenly, we are walking along the Croisette and people are talking about it. That was hard to believe.”
INEVITABLY, ROMANIA then being a country unused to outside attention, the domestic news media reacted with mild hysteria when the film carried off the top prize. Yet Mungiu feels the film’s grim message was somewhat obscured by all the hoopla.
“In Romania the Palme d’Or overwhelmed the polemic aspect of the film,” he says. “It generated debate in Catholic countries, like Italy, about abortion, but it didn’t generate any such debate at home because everybody was coming to see this miracle that had brought so much attention to Romania. They didn’t seem to notice that it was asking questions about their lives.”
Of course, the authorities could point to the fact that the film was set in the communist era and declaim that attitudes had moved on. Indeed, it remains a curiosity of the Romanian New Wave (as I guess we’re doomed to call it) that virtually all the films are set in the last few years of Ceausescu’s dictatorship. That shadow will, of course, continue to hang over the nation’s cultural affairs, but the time has come to look elsewhere. Has it not?
“It is time to stop,” he says. “I didn’t make these films because I was obsessed with the period. I made them because I wanted to revisit my twenties. I wanted to tell about becoming an adolescent. That was the communist years, there’s no way out of that. If these films work, they work not because they are about communism, but because they are personal stories. Communism is merely the background.”
But it is time to move on? “I think it is. For now.”
Tales from the Golden Age is on limited release
