The Way I Spent The End Of The World

The Way I Spent The End Of The World (Romania/France, dir­ector Catalin Mitulescu): This was an earnest but uneven film about life in Romania during the final months of Ceausescu’s rule in 1989. Teenaged Eva and her young brother Lalalilu live with their par­ents and suffer the hard­ships of living under a hated dic­tator. Since their neigh­bour is a cop, they have to be careful what they say, and Eva’s par­ents encourage her bud­ding romance with the policeman’s son Alex because of what the family con­nec­tion could do for them. Instead, her rebel­lious atti­tude gets her expelled from her school and sent to a tech­nical school for troubled stu­dents. There she con­nects with another neigh­bour, Andrei, whose family have already been pun­ished for protesting against the regime. Together they make plans to escape Romania by swim­ming across the Danube, but when the cru­cial moment comes, Eva turns back.

Meanwhile, Lilu is plot­ting with his friends how to kill the dic­tator. Young Timotei Duma is very remin­is­cent of Salvatore Cascio, who played young Salvatore (Toto) in Cinema Paradiso. Which means he was extremely cute, and some of his scenes were the best in the film. There are two whim­sical scenes where we seem to enter his child­like world: one is set in a sub­marine taxi where all the vil­la­gers can be taken to whatever city in Europe they wish to visit, and the other visu­al­izes the boy blowing a huge chewing gum bubble that becomes so large that it floats away. Clearly, the theme of escape is on everyone’s mind.

I wish there had been more scenes like that. Instead, most of the film con­sists of Eva’s various meet­ings with Alex or Andrei and very little dia­logue. For a main char­acter, she was just a little too enig­matic. I def­in­itely felt the film could have used a bit more dia­logue and a bit more editing to speed the pace a bit. As well, the ending could have used a bit more explic­a­tion. There are some pic­tures of Ceaucescu on live tele­vi­sion and what appears to be live cov­erage of him fleeing but there is no explan­a­tion. For Romanians this might be self-evident but for the rest of the world, we could use a little bit of help.

The ending itself is quite lovely, with the increasing ten­sion sud­denly released with Ceaucescu’s fall. And there were some moments of dark humour, as when the stu­dents are required to sing pat­ri­otic songs about how won­derful their lives are in Romania when it’s plain that everyone is living in misery. But there is a bit of unex­plained busi­ness at the end sur­rounding the policeman and his son Alex that bothered me. As well, there were a few strange cine­ma­to­graph­ical choices throughout the film that proved dis­tracting. Scenes would be clum­sily blocked by objects as if the dir­ector didn’t quite know where to place his camera. It’s not a huge sur­prise to dis­cover that this is Catalin Mitulescu’s first fea­ture film.

(7/10)

Tagged as: romania