Watching this, I recalled an old Saturday Night Live performance by the late comedian Andy Kaufman. Alone onstage, Kaufman began reading a passage from The Great Gatsby with a record player beside him. As the audience began growing impatient, he offered to play a record instead. Finally, he gave in to the audience and played the record...a recording of himself reading the same passage. It’s funny gag to recount, but the actual performance was three or four minutes of waiting for a single punch line. That kind of sums up director Corneliu Porumboiu’s follow-up to 12:08 East of Bucharest, a seriocomedy about quirky folk mulling over whether the death of communism had changed things in their small city . The characters here are less odd, but the overall low-key approach remains.
The premise is that a policeman, Cristi, has qualms about arresting a high school kid for a petty drug-possesion crime that will result in a prison term. This kind of moral question must come up a lot in the United States too, and is one worth exploring, but I wondered how, as presented, it would take up nearly two hours of screen time. The answer is that it doesn’t. I’ve got a pretty good tolerance for deliberate pacing, but probably this movie will bore the crap out of most filmgoers. Put in a music score and hire a ruthless editor and it would make an amusing 25-minute short, though, including most of the final sequence, in which Cristi too reads from a book.
Porumboiu has a style, notably a penchant for drab scenery, long takes, long, static shots, and asides that don’t advance the plot, although that last is not a bad thing. In one such aside, Cristi has a funny argument with his wife about the lyrics of a love song. Before that, we hear the entire song as Cristi sits at the table and eats dinner. The song finally ends…then it begins again. Andy Kaufman would’ve loved it.
IMDB link
viewed 2/3/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/3–4/10
No comments:
Post a Comment