Many of the shorts that are later expanded into a feature film seem to have been designed backwards for this specific purpose: an eye-catching flavor of what is clearly intended to be a larger work, though perhaps not quite as satisfying as a mini-film. Bogdan Muricanu’s critically acclaimed 2018 short film A Christmas Present — winner of the European Film Award for Best Short Film, among other awards — seems no such case. The film was poignant and darkly funny because it evoked a childish view of political terrorism through an unintentional act of protest, and served as a completely self-contained detail of a broader historical canvas. In Moricanu’s pantheon, which includes the first film The New Year That Never Came, “The Christmas Gift” is cleverly reworked as one of several intimate and integral vignettes, creating a frayed tapestry of Romanian social and political turmoil in the country’s final days. From communist rule.
Set against a momentous setting—specifically, the winter week of revolution that preceded the precipitous downfall, trial, and execution of communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu on Christmas Day 1989—the film’s accumulation of small, human dramas brings together a real sense of scale and momentum. Slightly stretched at 138 minutes, and a bit vague in its opening stretch, this is a symphonic work that gains its sustained and imprecise use of Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” throughout its thrilling climax, with an artistic, audience-friendly sweep that wins it over. Grand Prize at the Orizzonte Competition in Venice last year, and most recently the New Voices, New Visions Award in Palm Springs. A writer who turned to filmmaking in middle age, Mauritano clearly intends to join the most ambitious category of contemporary Romanian auteurs.
The events unfold over the course of just two days in a Bucharest sapped of its seasonal spirit, as the sidewalk-level fury of the Ceaușescu regime cuts through the December chill, and “The New Year That Never Came” takes on great dramatic irony from the sheer speed of events. The impending ruin of the president: No one here knows that he will die in less than a week, or that the post-communist era in Romania is approaching. Panic and paranoia about the consequences of criticizing or endorsing the current dictatorship runs through most of the complex narrative threads that make up Mauritano’s original text. Whispers of a government-ordered massacre of protesters in remote Timisoara escalated over the course of the proceedings into an angry collective outcry.
The tragedy of Timisoara casts a particularly heavy shadow on the mind of Florina (Nicoleta Hanko, first among equals in a brilliant ensemble), a stage actress who receives an offer she cannot refuse – as much as she would like to do so – when the producers decide to contact us for a New Year’s Eve TV special New: The show already exists, but their most famous former star is Undesirable character After her recent defection, Florina lookalike is needed to re-record her scenes. The gig promised Florina the biggest show of her career, but she refused to have to give an “obligatory tribute” to Ceausescu on camera, praising him as a “living symbol of love for this country.” Producer Stefan (Mihai Kalin) is also distracted: his university-age son Laurentio (Andre Mercure) has attracted the attention of the fearsome secret police after appearing in a satirical student play, and is trying to flee the country.
One of the investigating policemen, Ionut (Julian Postelniko), is also preoccupied with personal matters, having just moved his stubborn and depressed mother Margarita (Emilia Dobrin) into a new apartment after her house was long slated for demolition by the government. Emotionally unable to let go of the old place, she asks a favor from one of the hired movers, Jello (Adrian Vansecca) – whose story revolves around the place where “A Christmas Present” meticulously enters into the proceedings. This funny yet devastating story of the domestic fallout when Gilo’s young son naively echoes his father’s death wish for Ceausescu in a letter to Santa Claus remains the sharpest and most bitterly comic in the film’s braided narrative.
After a prologue that may leave some viewers adrift in which a flurry of characters is introduced without much supporting context, Muricanu and editors Vanja Kovacevic and Mircea Lakatos find a deftly vertiginous rhythm to their multi-headed narrative, setting common personal and political threads in parallel threads while maintaining a strong, timed feel. In linear time. Only Laurentiu’s individual story feels a little underdeveloped compared to its counterparts. Otherwise, the thematic and demographic contrasts between the sequences are considered and informative.
Filming seamlessly in the tight, academic proportion that echoes the television broadcast on which much of the story hinges—all the better to seamlessly weave archival footage into the final reel—cinematographers Boruca Biro and Todor Platon capture the bleakness of communism’s final moments in their color palette of Don Brown and corporate blues One. The same goes for the period production and costume design, which was downright sloppy in every detail from the clunky rotary phones to the knitwear, but without any hint of nostalgia: if the past is a foreign country, then the future, or at least the 1990s, will tempt you. . With some promise of home.