Fata care mănâncă pizza / Girl Eating Pizza (2015)

Adrian Cârlugea, Bogdan Coste and Ion Indolean’s Fata care mănâncă pizza (Girl Eating Pizza) is a five-minute short film shot on a Romanian street corner in which an unseen director choreographs the entrances, exits, and actions while in frame, of people, vehicles and the occasional pigeon.  Except it becomes apparent that in fact these are general passers-by going about their daily business with a voice-over making it seem they are being directed to perform the gestures they are making anyway.  The concept is lifted (with acknowledgement) from The Girl Chewing Gum, a 1976 short made in London by John Smith.  Both films nod to the French New Wave and in particular Francois Truffaut’s La Nuit américaine, were shot on random, though busy, corners, and utlise limited camera movements.  The films’ titles are taken from small moments which pass quickly and would not stand out unless drawn attention to, the young lady eating pizza as she walks echoing the earlier girl chewing gum.

 There are obvious differences of course, not least the Romanian street’s greater attractiveness compared to Smith’s grimy Dalston Junction. The modern film is in colour and apparently recorded on a phone, though thankfully the image is stable, whereas Smith’s is black-and-white 16 mm.  The former also observes the unities, whereas Smith eventually claims to be standing in a field 15 miles from Hackney and switches to a 360-degree pan of a rural landscape to conclude his film.  Most significantly, in terms of style it could be argued that Fata care mănâncă pizza is purer in following through its intention than is The Girl Chewing Gum.

 That is because Smith quickly abandons the deception he is conducting proceedings, by panning up to a clock and pretending to direct the speed of the hands, and giving rapid-fire lists of ‘instructions’ no assistant director could follow.  He breaks the link between voice-over and events, and therefore the assumption of cause and effect; we see the narration had to have been added afterwards and he is describing what has happened, not giving orders.  Eventually he abandons the pose of director altogether and makes up stories about passers-by (a man is going home, another robbed a post office and has a gun), including surreal elements (references to a blackbird with a nine-foot wingspan, a man with a helicopter in his pocket).

 Cârlugea, Coste and Indolean, however, maintain the illusion that they are dictating the mise-en-scène longer, the cumulative implausibility being how one would organise so many actors and why one would want to.  But when the camera pans to the right to show a busy main thoroughfare full of pedestrians and traffic (echoing Smith’s pan to show the queue outside the Odeon cinema) they cannot convince they are able to synchronise the landing of a bird on a distant building and the appearance of a priest, just as Smith cannot convince that his pigeon wrangler is able to organise specific flight paths through the frame.  Even so, Fata care mănâncă pizza concludes by implying the shot has been ruined by a careless camera movement and needs to be redone.

 Smith is rightly celebrated for the trick he plays on audiences used to the idea of the auteur commanding the action like a monarch (instead he is subservient to it), and for demonstrating that originality need not be constrained by resources.  Irrespective of the experimental film conceit of pretending to control the arbitrary, once we realise we are not watching fiction we can appreciate the documentary aspect of both these films.  Such ordinary scenes have their own fascination which grows stronger as they recede in time.  Supplementing such pleasures, Smith, Cârlugea, Coste and Indolean remind us that those who claim to govern may only give the impression of being in charge while life swirls, unheeding, around them.

  

Fata care mănâncă is available on CinePub:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkiwJVlF2qk&list=PLn0Jy9I2VIyRdOlNnOsu8TCaUSUDHrwzP&index=49&t=0s

Five Romanian Poets, by Lidia Vianu (ed.)

Translated and edited by Lidia Vianu, the 2020 collection Five Romanian Poets (Cinci poeți români ) was published by the Contemporary Literature Press at the University of Bucharest.  The five are Romița Mălina Constantin, Diana Geacăr, Emil Nicolae, Ioan Es. Pop and Floarea Țuțuianu.  They are winners of the 2019 Lidia Vianu Translates poetry competition, run by Vianu herself and aimed at choosing Romanian poems not only on their merits but for their translatability into English.

The writers provide short personal statements preceding their poems but the reader will need to look elsewhere for fuller biographical and bibliographical information.  There are between five and seven poems for each, appearing as parallel texts.  These give a flavour of their styles, but again a larger selection would have been welcome.  Translating them, Vianu says that she could have written the lines herself, so the choices are personal and not necessarily representative of the wider poetry scene in Romania.

Still, translation of Romanian poetry is not a crowded field, and Lidia Vianu is to be thanked for making these available to an English-language audience.  They all work well in translation, the best focusing on small gestures, domestic scenes, aging, and the passing of the generations.  There is little sense of political or wider social engagement, perhaps reflecting Vianu’s own attitudes.  Leaving aside issues of selection criteria, what we have here is a good introduction to these particular voices, and future competitions should cumulatively make accessible a significant body of Romanian poetry in English translation.

The e-book is available free on the Contemporary Literature Press website:

editura.mttlc.ro/five-romanian-poets-2019.html

The Beauty of Bucharest, by S J Varengo

[N.B. there are spoilers, but frankly this tripe deserves it]

Unfortunately, The Beauty of Bucharest is not a travel guide or hymn of praise to the Romanian capital, rather it is a vapid thriller that happens to be mostly set there.  As well as being simplistic in its plotting and entirely unoriginal, the novel plays into lazy clichés and stereotypes of Romania as a dangerous place full of corruption, organised crime, white slavery, cheeky grasping cabbies and incompetent law enforcement.

Over in Denver, Colorado, retired 50-something computer games developer Dan Porter has been happily married to his gorgeous sexy younger wife Nicole for twenty years.  To his intense astonishment one day he discovers she is an international assassin, head of an organisation called the Clean Up Crew (abbreviated by its members to CUC, possibly some kind of obscure sex-based joke by the author).

This surprising fact he learns when he opens the boot of their car in a supermarket car park to find a dead body in it, after which his wife not only confesses her secret life but enlists him in it.  He discovers Clean Up Crew is not actually a company cleaning up crime scenes after all, though they do do that – mostly their own – instead they ‘clean up’ bad guys, administering their own form of extreme justice to make the world a better place.  Now Dan knows what Nicole was really doing on those business trips.

While he is still reeling from shock, Nicole decides to take him on her next assignment, which happens to be in Bucharest.  The Beauty of the title is Ana Albu, a young supermodel who has been kidnapped by Bogdan Grigorescu, clearly the evilest man in the whole of Romania (and probably several adjacent countries), with the glowering manner and disgusting cigars to prove it.  Naturally he is very wealthy and occupies a large well-appointed palace in which he must rattle around.

Aided by sadistic Rosa Klebb-style six-foot blue-haired security chief Ileana Gabor, his organisation trafficks young women (after Grigorescu abuses them himself) to whoever wants to buy.  Ana will be his biggest score yet, to be sold for a huge amount of lei to, it is heavily hinted, an Arab potentate.  Nicole’s primary task is to kill Grigorescu, but she and Dan happily add the rescue of Ana to the to-do list, then find about twenty more desperate young women in need of their assistance.  As this book is the first of a series, there are no prizes for guessing how it works out.

As a supposedly top agent, Nicole shows herself to be not quite the expert one might expect, despite being portrayed as powerful and assertive, and with over twenty years’ experience.  Apart from allowing her husband to find the body in the boot, he saves her life more than once during their expedition, and she would never have penetrated Grigorescu’s well-defended palace without his skills learned from games development.  Despite her being the boss, once he gets over his shock at finding what Nicole does for a living, Dan shows he is pretty good at it.

At the novel’s heart is the relationship between the pair, and the implausible McMillan & Wife dialogue sinks any vestiges of credibility left by the ridiculous plot.  The sexual attraction between them too is laid on thickly to the point of absurdity; Nicole is frequently distracted from the life-and-death struggle by her high sex drive and her husband’s desirable bod, especially when he is in spandex.  However, a dark side is hinted at by the lurid description of her becoming horny seeing Dan blow Ileana’s brains out.  There are mysteries only to be divulged in the sequels.

It is hard to believe such a mission would have been given to a single individual, which it was before Dan was invited along, even with the help of a local fixer (who promptly gets himself killed anyway).  To guarantee a successful outcome for something this difficult surely requires a large team.  Nicole and newbie Dan manage to achieve the task with a degree of luck I doubt would occur in real life, though the whole idea of a secret organisation devoted to murdering criminals nobody else can touch is preposterous anyway.  Bucharest deserves better than this.