Apart from the beginning and end, Sînziana Nicola’s 2013 short Duminică takes place entirely in a car as, we eventually discover, a brother and sister are driving to a hospital, where a relative is dying. Their emotional distance is signalled right at the beginning when she waits outside his block, smoking, and their greetings are perfunctory. Much of the journey is taken up by the sister, for something to say, telling her brother about a strange experience she had when she went to an interview at ten in the evening and tried to take a taxi afterwards.
A man got in who
neither she nor the driver knew, and when he suggested he take her home and she
objected he became aggressive, leading to a row in the street. When she took another cab, he and his friends
followed behind, shouting. As she haltingly
tells her tale, her brother disapproves, obviously thinking she handled the
situation badly and naively underestimated the danger she could have been in. He blames her and her 'big mouth' rather than
the people with whom she had the run-in.
Exasperated, he wonders who would be holding an interview at 10 o’clock,
and asks why she didn’t call him.
Her response is
that it was 'an unconventional events company', the interview a waste of time,
and she can manage her own affairs. Determined
to finish the story, she becomes heated defending herself, one of those
situations in which whatever is said is going to irritate to the other
person. Annoyed, he won’t allow her to
smoke and turns off the music she puts on.
They subside, tired of the friction and an uneasy silence follows as he
steers them through heavy city traffic. He
asks her for chocolate, which he had previously refused, a symbol of their
truce. We leave them standing outside
the hospital entrance, smoking to postpone the inevitable.
This Sunday is definitely
not a day of rest. In less than a
quarter of an hour we have been shown a situation common among siblings having
little in common but bound together by family, so obliged to spend time in each
other’s company. This is an especial
difficulty for the younger one, who risks being patronised. Simply shot from the back seat, the viewer’s
interpretation arises from their tone and body language as much as the words,
signalling years of the big brother despairing of his undisciplined sister
(tellingly he wears a seatbelt but she does not), and sister wondering whether
she will ever be taken seriously.
This was Sînziana
Nicola’s first film as director, and it won her a prize at the Stuttgarter
Filmwinter – Festival for Expended Media.
It is available on Cinepub:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k163TPVFga4&list=PLn0Jy9I2VIyRdOlNnOsu8TCaUSUDHrwzP&index=53&t=0s
