De ce trag clopotele, Mitica?

Not the best cinematography (who cares?), not the best acting (who cares?), not the best script (who cares?), but... It has a story, it has wit, it has fire, it has no dead moments, it is true, it has a heart, it has a strong punch at the last scene... It has everything to want to watch it again, and again. You want to be one of them because being one of them makes your blood boils, makes you cry with them because of petty lies, makes you smell the sweat of the wild party... At dawn, when the fumes of the heavy drinking start to dissipate you want to pull yourself together because of the hard-to-digest answer.

It is where Kusturica was invented. It is where Kusturica learned his metier.

Isn't this enough for a true experience?

this piece of art is an internal reflection of a the human being who doesn't know his origin nor his destination, no beginnings or endings symbolized by the vain corrupt actions that he might commit at any time and an open but morbid infinite sky which keeps on appearing above a gypsy land. most movies which had some of that, like Satan's tango, or Underground were not on the level of this movie, until today I haven't found the English translation, but this movie is like a song written by Ache and Jethro Tull and Paganini all together. The philosophical content of this movie is not present in Swedish works by Ingmar nor films like songs from the second floor. As a whole I haven't seen much art in American Cinema, so we may set this movie as the only movie to belong to art as in music and painting, and hence as the best film until today. Congratulations to the director.

The basic value of this movie is rather conjectural than intrinsic. It acquired a mythical subversive quality, simply because the communist censorship of Romania brutally and unfairly banned it (going to such lenghts as even locking all the copies into a safe, where they stayed until the 1989 Revolution). In truth, the movie had nothing subversive, being only too brutal, misanthropic, naturalist and frivolous for the communists' taste. Pintilie's main (and childish!) mistake was to bring to open an essential dimension of Caragiale's satire that consisted in SUBTLETY. The great playwright's pieces seem to depict a vaudeville-like reality, in an innocuous and harmless comedy style - being based, in truth, on a very profound critical vision to the most essential vices and fallacies of human nature. Tempted by a shallow ambition to shock the sanctimonious communist censors, Pintilie raised this implicit element to a violently explicit level. Well, what he sought, he got! At a professional level, the movie is extremely in-equal, combining a really valuable stage heritage (powerful characters, exquisite performances, atrocious humor), with a totally amateurish movie-directing. Without any legitimate reason, it compiles onto the main play's storyline several other alien subjects from various short stories, thus becoming chaotic, messy and over-the-top. The mise-en-scene is usually skillfully conducted (Pintilie being a good theater director), but compromised by too many awkwardly framed and timed shots. Towards the end, everything becomes redundant, over-lenghtened and boring... And the final shot is a complete failure: without any aesthetic justification, Pintilie takes an auctorial distance, including in the picture his own camera-crew (only as a cheap and tacky trick), and himself, with the parting-shot: "Let them die stupid!" Such an attitude towards his own characters, by turning the critical distance into petty wickedness, is intolerably unprofessional.

Although not so well-known as others East European cinemas (Polish or Czech, for instance), the Romanian school managed to produce several high-quality movies. One of them -- some would say the best -- is "Why do they ring the bells, Mitica?".

Inspired by the work of the Romanian play-writer I.L. Caragiale, a bitter-funny witness of the 20th turn-of-the-century Romanian burgeois mores, the movie manages to grasp the cheap, frantic, colourful and slightly hysteric atmosphere of Caragiale's plays.

The movie's director, Lucian Pintilie, is one of the few success stories of the Romanian cinema. He turns the classical, linear plot of the play into a zigzagged scenario, combining it with several other Caragiale's short-stories. The result is a weird combination of crazy carnival scenes and short, alienated insertions reminding of Antognioni's "Red Dessert". A burlesque, fast-paced, snowball-like comedy (because, after all, *it remains* a comedy) with plenty of post-modernist auto-reflexivity and deep meditative undertones.

In fact, these undertones made the Communist regime to ban the movie during the '80s, considering it as having a strong subversive potential. (This was not the first Pintilie's banned movie in Romania: during the '70s, another one, "Reconstituirea", a satyric critique of the totalitarian Communist regime, was added on the black list of forbidden movies).

But, IMHO, the strongest part of this movie is not the director or the fact that it spoke up against a totalitarian regime. Its best moments reside in the tremendous performances of the actors. Rebengiuc, Dinica, Mihut, Diaconu, Vasilescu -- to name just a few -- give their best acting experience in this movie. It is a pity that they are not so well-known outside the Romanian cultural sphere...

---

Think of this movie as a Romanian "Firemen's Ball" or a Balkanic "Il Vitelloni", but with a finger stuck on the fast-forward button, and you'll have a good approximation of it. :o)

It had all the good premises: a great director, an all-star cast, and it was based on the works of a great author. Still...

After the first shocks triggered by its naturalism and the real delight of many memorable satirical scenes (the heated political discourse in the public bath, the chase in the barbershop, the 'patriotic' Marseillaise singing, the eulogy for Mitica, and so on), the viewer becomes a bit uncomfortable.

There is something over the top and inauthentic with all that boorish vulgarity and gratuitous violence, and most of all with the directorial post-modern 'reflections' (though his final verdict 'Let them die stupid' is not that exaggerated, as Caragiale himself has said he hated his characters). It's like seeing the world only through dark lenses.