Doar cu buletinul la Paris

Serban Marinescu is one of the pin-up directors in Romanian cinema, Cinemagia listing 11 and IMDb 10 movies directed by him. In his lengthy career started in 1984, he collaborated with most of the Romanian actors which regular movie- and theatre-goers would have heard of. He uses a lot of those still alive in his most recent picture "Going to Paris with your ID card only".

The movie is done in the realist, grim style of the Romanian New Wave. There is no score, the camera moves slowly, there are frequent pauses to allow the viewer to absorb the story. During the first couple of minutes, nothing happens and yet we've learned everything we need to know about the lead character, professor Nita. He sleeps with a hat and day clothes on - because it's too cold and he can't pay for the heating, his austere home is full of books stacked all over the place but not in a bookcase. He is one of the victims of the falling of the communism, cultured but without the stamina and selfishness to make a decent living in a dog-eat-dog society.

Yes despite the attention to detail and solid cinematography, this movie has not been listed by any festival. Not that festivals are a measure of quality, but the success of the New Wave is certainly measured in festival prizes and not in audiences which have been meagre due to the misery of the stories and lack of cinematic pace.

This movie hasn't been made for the large audiences either.

The plot is full of stories inside the story, it feels like the director/ scriptwriter wanted to give 15' of limelight to all the great actors involved but the result is a hotchpotch. There is no justification of any character's actions, they just do things in their own minor sub-plots which somehow come together but not really meaningfully. Professor Nita's story would easily have fit into a 15' short, the rest of the movie is just a rant against the post-communist Romanian society. Maybe that's another reason this movie fared so poorly at festivals: it's just too "Romanian", the old stories about the University square, miners, Ceausescu, stray children have no traction outside the country. Or inside it, judging by the lack of home success too.

I don't think there was any private interest to fund a movie like this and I can't understand why the public purse would fund it either (maybe other than the names of the actors involved which should certainly not be a reason. Good actors can make a bad movie and this is a case in point). The same old rehashed stories about how bad the new is and how good the old was, the same old actors without any of the new guys being given a hand up...

'Doar cu buletinul la Paris' is a film I almost avoided seeing. Judging by its title, it seemed to be one of those Romanian comedies blessed with an excellent cast, but which generally recirculates and perpetuates overused jokes. In the end, however, I decided to see it because of the name of director Serban Marinescu and of some of the actors in the cast. I had a pleasant surprise.'Doar cu buletinul la Paris' employs that same sarcastic and desperate comic of Romanian films after 1990 (on the line of 'Philanthropy') but manages to insert some interesting and authentic moments of cinema, and provides the opportunity of an extraordinary supporting role to Dorel Visan, one of the the great Romanian actors whose talent was somehow pre-empted from expressing themselves by the stereotypical distribution in roles appropriate to the patterns of the epochs. Here the actor seems to take full revenge, perhaps creating the role of his life or in any case the role of the latest part of his career.

The principal hero of the film is a teacher of French language and literature (Mircea Diaconu), single, aging, whose dream is to get to see Paris for a few days. The discipline he teaches has become useless and obsolete like Romania's francophony. Paris is now seemingly at hand, Romania is in Europe, its citizens cross borders without a passport, but with the hero's poor teacher's salary it would take him about ten years to raise money for the trip. He hopes to be included in a bus trip organized by the city hall, but the corrupt mayor replaces him at the last minute with his secretary, who is also his mistress. This is the starting point of a series of events in which vile or ridiculous characters steal from each other, in which the lack of chances of the unfortunates of the transition leads some to pathetic speeches, others to sublime but ultimately useless goodness acts.

Mircea Diaconu enters very well the role of the naive, but I can't help feeling that he is repeating the same role in some of his films from the last two decades. The same can be said about Razvan Vasilescu who plays the role of the perfect vilain, the opportunistic and unscrupulous trafficket enriched at the expense of his neighbors. The best acting belongs to Dorel Visan, who interprets an archetype of the generation of pensioners hit by the slow and unfair transition, misinformed by television and contaminated by the virus of nostalgia for communism. Director Serban Marinescu uses several times the process of direct dialogue between the main hero and the spectator (a la Woody Allen) which works perfectly here, and adapts the movements of the camera to the story. The interior staircase of the block is filmed at angles specific to horror movies, in the scenes in which the television team shows up he uses a mobile camera as in live reporting. The good cinematography, the actors' performances, the approaching of a familiar theme through well-written dialogues mixing absurd and sarcasm made this film to exceed my expectations. The ending is one of desperate optimism.