Part of cinema’s Romanian wave has been a shrewd, satirically surreal use of archive clips as a way of remembering the strangeness of the country’s communist and pre-communist past. In 2010, Andrei Ujică’s three-hour The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu was a film footage collage of his dictatorial life and times; and in 2020 Radu Jude’s The Exit of the Trains used official archive material to shed light on wartime antisemitism. Jude, with co-director Christian Ferencz-Flatz, has now curated a found-footage fever dream of Romania’s post-Ceauşescu passion for capitalism.
It is a mosaic of moments from TV ads in the 1990s, frantically flogging everything: soft drinks, sausages, laxatives, a new Dracula-based theme park, shares in Thatcher-style government privatisation schemes and mobile phones. One rather witty ad has Ceauşescu making a speech being interrupted by a phone – the tagline promises “free speech”. Romanian legends like Ilie Năstase and Nadia Comăneci appear, while the clips are broadly divided into chapter-headings; one tranche of ads displaying gender stereotypes is introduced with the Godardian intertitle “Masculine Feminine”. Sometimes Jude and Ferencz-Flatz take out the audio entirely so we can just focus on the eerie garish images in silence. Freeze-frames show us the quasi-porn ecstatic closing of eyes at the moment of taste. Ads for actual porn phone lines show us something similar. In one “cutting room floor” moment, we see multiple takes of an unhappy actor in an ad for financial services stumbling over the line “We all strive to multiply your money” over and over again.
It’s an amusing collection – a glimpse of the id of Romania’s new psyche – but perhaps the same thing could be done and the same point made with TV ads from anywhere in the world. (In our online social media world, these expensively crafted vignettes themselves look a little antique.) I wonder if there is moreover a touch of naivety in a prestigious movie director treating ads as crude, almost unauthored primitive material to be ironically edited and juxtaposed by a higher artistic mind. Many advertising directors, after all, go on to make brilliant films – including the great Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu who, before he was an arthouse film-maker of note, made a series of amusing TV ads for mobile phones featuring the yet-to-be-discovered actor Vlad Ivanov. At any rate, this is a diverting addition to Jude’s filmography.
• Eight Postcards from Utopia is on Mubi from 8 August.
