Review of Tales from the Golden Age

I love Kieslowski's films of morally compromised lives in communist Poland. But communist Poland was never half as scary as Ceacescu's 'Golden Age' in Romania, which is perhaps why it's only now that Romanain cinema appears to be enjoying it's own golden era, with many great films looking back at the dictatorship and its legacy. Chris Mungiu's 'Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days' is perhaps the finest of them; here he has scripted a bunch of illustrative (and not necessarily so tall) tales, which are directed by himself and a number of collaborators (though who produced which episode is not acknowledged). In some ways, the first tale (about an official visit) is almost unbeatable, a black comedy that had me laughing out loud; the last (about a couple of bottle-stealers) has the most obvious stylistic echoes of Mungiu's own work. But all of them capture the mixture of poverty, deference, fear and, paradoxically, individual selfishness, that characterised life under communism. The stories are superficially slight, but the smallest of transgressions carry grotesquely exaggerated weight Bitter wryness and naturalistic acting, camera work and dialogue, mark the films as a whole: a highly recommended set.