Gary's Corner

Hello everyone. Every shot in the trailer for the Romanian crime melodrama Dogs — this week’s addition to our Virtual Cinema lineup (see below) — suggests a young filmmaker with a gifted compositional ‘eye.’

Veteran Variety critic Peter Debruge writes, “An austere, yet technically accomplished cross between the Coen brothers’ ‘Blood Simple’ and Cannes sensation ‘Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’ — one that Romanian cinema devotees might call ‘Police, Noun’ — Mirică’s debut feature belongs to a tradition of cynical, almost nihilistic crime thrillers in which a relatively petty motive can leave dozens lying in pools of their own blood. Though we experience the film through the eyes of a naïve outsider, Roman (Dragoș Bucur), who leaves the law and order of the city to tend to an inheritance issue, the first shot — in which flies buzz ominously as the camera tracks through nettles and weeds to a stagnant pool of water, the calm surface of which is disturbed first by bubbles and then the shocking appearance of a severed human foot — promises something far more sinister just beneath the surface of this rural grassland.”

Romanian cinema first caught the attention of many international cineastes in 2007 with the Cannes Palme d’Or winner Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days. Other provocative titles such as The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,  Police, Adjective, Graduation and 12:08 East of Bucharest played art houses around the world, and adventurous New Plaza Cinema viewers may recall our screenings of I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians and the multi-Oscar-nominated Collective.

The Romanian cinematic renaissance seems to me to follow a pattern: when a country undergoes a socio-political upheaval, as Romania surely did after the Cold War era finally — and in its case, violently — ended in the late 1980s, a medium like the movies is often a pungent outlet for recounting decades of injustice and repression. In recent decades, we’ve also seen this in nations and territories as diverse as France, Iran, Hong Kong and, Taiwan, and international cinema is all the richer for it…