Omul zilei

Tired, stiff, arthritic...

The dialogs are so false and rigid, that they smack from a mile's distance at radiophonic theater from the Sixties... Gongorically declarative phrases, alternating with profanities, to show explicitly that "now it's allowed".

The script is messy, deliberately (or maybe unwittingly) labyrinthine, uselessly complicated. That it's hard to follow is only half of the problem. The other half is that we don't give a damn to decipher it.

The direction, extremely old-style - not in the good sense: not "vintage", not "classic", not "retro", but half-dead. Lack of rhythm, limp narrative feeling, flat frame-compositions... The characters are followed with an ostentatious vengeance, and the performers (many of them, really good!) are made to act false and didactic.

The music: awkward and annoying. A lame theme being abusively mixed in all during the movie; it's trampling on our nerves since the beginning. In the end, it arrived to drive us out of our minds.

The message: simplistic, linear, mundane: "Romanian big-shots is thieves, dam 'em all to hell!" Okay, the statement is true - and so what? Even a La Fontaine fable would have more subtlety.

A movie that shouldn't have been. A real pity.