Childhood comes around only once, needless to say, and where you spend your formative years is a matter of happenstance. For Lalailu Matei(Timotei Duma), his childhood happens to be in Romainia, during the latter stage of President Nicolas Ceausescu's fifteen-year reign. From our perspective, and the family's perspective, communist-era Romainia offers itself as a pretty bleak primer on life for a young boy like Lalailu. Under Ceausescu's rule, food was short, gas was short, medical supplies, you name it, short, and a man could be thrown into prison on a moment's notice. But while the tall people remember their country during its better days, Lalailu benefits from having a short memory. While he and his little friends may curse the effect that this Romainian dictator has on their lives, the anger is largely theoretical, a reciprocation of their parents' frustration with the gap between their present and former lives. Late in "Cum mi-am petrecut sfarsitul lumii", Lalailu is judiciously used as a discordant instrument against the state apparatus, in a scene where the boy passes off a poem written by his friend's grandfather as his own words(for festivities in honor of Ceausescu), thanking the president "for this wonderful childhood of mine". Does Lalailu fully grasp the sarcasm and contempt of what he's reading? Although the poem is part of his assassination plot against Ceausescu, does the boy truly understand its propagandistic undertones of the author, as a subversive attack of the official propaganda of the state? After all, this is the only childhood he knows, and by all appearances, in spite of the less-than-ideal circumstances of a police state, the boy seems reasonably happy. That's because he and his friends, the resilient creatures which children are, transform the intrigue of their small village into a game. The reality of communist-era Romainia is better reflected through Eva, Lalailu's older sister, who learns: If you break the bust of Nicolas Ceausescu's head, you more than pay for it.
"Light a candle while you listen to this and you'll see the future," read the note that Anita Miller(Zooey Deschanel) left behind in the gatefold cover of The Who's "Tommy" in Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous". Her younger brother William(Patrick Fugit) finds the note, lights the candle, plays the record, and is shocked into his sister's existence via Pete Townshend's axe. "Cum mi-am petrecut sfarsitul lumii" riffs on this scene, as Lalailu, likewise, undergoes a horizon realignment after he plays a vinyl record, belonging to their new neighbor Andrei(Cristian Vavaru), the son of Ceausescu protesters, who goes to the same reform school as Eva. Unlike William, the Romainian boy has some serious reservations about the heavy riffage that greets him at the record player; he asks his big sis, "You like this, don't you?" She does, and consequently, so does Lalailu. The rock music serves as a counterpoint to the official music of the state: inspirational anthems about the motherland, which Eva and the other reform students are forced to sing. The music offers Eva a safe rebellion against her codified life; a life in which her parents use her as an enticement to the cop's son, Alex(Ionut Becheru), Eva's former beau who busted the bust, as a way of augmenting their already compromised lives with unforgivable compromises, by asking their daughter to be, in essence, a whore, for medicine and other gratuities. When Lalailu delivers Eva the album of Romainian metal, Andrei not only offers the girl an escape through anarchic and illicit music, but also the promise of a literal escape from their restricted lives; the promise of change. They hatch a plan to cross the Danube River. They train. Unable to cross the Danube herself, however, Eva returns home, and gets an earful from her mother. "You're always stuck with that idiot," she tells Eva. And in a move that's pure rock and roll, Lalailu decides to kill Ceausescu while he silently watches both women argue. The night before his speaking engagement, Eva teaches her brother a folk song on her guitar, the instrument Woody Guthrie described as a "machine" that "kills fascists". With this gesture, Eva passes on the gift of music, as Anita did in "Almost Famous", but with something riding on the line more than being cool(Anita to William, "One day, you'll be cool."). Whereas William lived out his rock and roll fantasy, Lalailu remains there, carrying out his pretend assassination on live television, closer to a full consciousness-raising, closer to understanding the method to his madness. Meanwhile, Eva leaves home and becomes an attendant on a luxury liner, a stewardess of sorts(the song Eva teaches Lalailu is like the equivalent of Anita playing Simon & Garfunkel's "America" for her mother, in which Deschanel delivers the immortal line: "This song explains why I'm leaving home to become a stewardess.")
"Light a candle while you listen to this and you'll see the future," read the note that Anita Miller(Zooey Deschanel) left behind in the gatefold cover of The Who's "Tommy" in Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous". Her younger brother William(Patrick Fugit) finds the note, lights the candle, plays the record, and is shocked into his sister's existence via Pete Townshend's axe. "Cum mi-am petrecut sfarsitul lumii" riffs on this scene, as Lalailu, likewise, undergoes a horizon realignment after he plays a vinyl record, belonging to their new neighbor Andrei(Cristian Vavaru), the son of Ceausescu protesters, who goes to the same reform school as Eva. Unlike William, the Romainian boy has some serious reservations about the heavy riffage that greets him at the record player; he asks his big sis, "You like this, don't you?" She does, and consequently, so does Lalailu. The rock music serves as a counterpoint to the official music of the state: inspirational anthems about the motherland, which Eva and the other reform students are forced to sing. The music offers Eva a safe rebellion against her codified life; a life in which her parents use her as an enticement to the cop's son, Alex(Ionut Becheru), Eva's former beau who busted the bust, as a way of augmenting their already compromised lives with unforgivable compromises, by asking their daughter to be, in essence, a whore, for medicine and other gratuities. When Lalailu delivers Eva the album of Romainian metal, Andrei not only offers the girl an escape through anarchic and illicit music, but also the promise of a literal escape from their restricted lives; the promise of change. They hatch a plan to cross the Danube River. They train. Unable to cross the Danube herself, however, Eva returns home, and gets an earful from her mother. "You're always stuck with that idiot," she tells Eva. And in a move that's pure rock and roll, Lalailu decides to kill Ceausescu while he silently watches both women argue. The night before his speaking engagement, Eva teaches her brother a folk song on her guitar, the instrument Woody Guthrie described as a "machine" that "kills fascists". With this gesture, Eva passes on the gift of music, as Anita did in "Almost Famous", but with something riding on the line more than being cool(Anita to William, "One day, you'll be cool."). Whereas William lived out his rock and roll fantasy, Lalailu remains there, carrying out his pretend assassination on live television, closer to a full consciousness-raising, closer to understanding the method to his madness. Meanwhile, Eva leaves home and becomes an attendant on a luxury liner, a stewardess of sorts(the song Eva teaches Lalailu is like the equivalent of Anita playing Simon & Garfunkel's "America" for her mother, in which Deschanel delivers the immortal line: "This song explains why I'm leaving home to become a stewardess.")