"Glissando" means a smooth movement along a surface. In Mircea Daneliuc's movie the surface is the luxuriant reality of the effervescent and lavish Romanian bourgeoisie between the two World Wars.
The main character skates on the thin, cracked surface of that reality, terribly infelicitously equipped for survival. His main resources are those of the disappearing nobility - courteousness, deep understanding and endless love for art, irreproachable gallantry with women, a beautiful use of both language and silence, a strong propensity for idealism and introspection.
The reality, in all its cruelty and vulgarity, is introduced by a "nouveau riche" character torturing his children to recite Verlaine and play the violin as a proof of how much money he invested in their education. This aggressively healthy and disgracefully wealthy specimen invites Stefan Iordache at his domain, thinking that some of the glittery manners of his guest might rub off on himself.
The loud coarseness of the "nouveau riche" threatens to spoil the whole summer, but the reality slides away when Stefan Iordache's character encounters "the man in the dream".
This man, slim, tall and obviously one of the last true nobles of his time, always accompanied by a child, has the physical appearance of a strange man that used to appear in all Stefan Iordache's dreams since childhood. Always silent and accompanied by a mute, pale and wide-eyed child, the man was invariably there providing him with comfort in all those strange and inexplicably threatening situations that occur in dreams.
In real life "the man in the dream" appears as an old inveterate gambler who has to sell all the leftovers of his fortune to cover his gambling debts.
Helpless and humiliated by people and events, the man in the dream is there, in the reality, only to point out that the destruction approaching the "belle epoque" world was so terrible that not even dreams could resist it.
The difference between dream and reality gets thinner and thinner day by day, so that Stefan Iordache finds himself confronted with more and more lack of sense, the whole world turning into a Kafka-like scene. The whole world is compressed and the camera moves from mental hospitals and hospices to casinos. In a chest X ray Stefan Iordache sees his own body inhabited by the man in the dream and the mute, pale boy. The boundaries between fantasy and reality are turning smokier and the man is confused on every plane of his existence.
The values he believed in begin to disappear, the man in the dream turns out to be a loser himself, love is little else than lust and conspiracy for survival. The character played by Tora Vasilescu, a governess that becomes the lover of Stefan Iordache offers one of the best cinematographic portraits of love seen as complicity and deliberate refusal of spirituality, of devouring and primitive femininity triumphing over the masculine need of understanding. While still in love and desperately longing for a woman we only see in a picture, Stefan Iordache is enslaved by Tora Vasilescu's fiery erotism, by her capability to ignore everything that is not real and conducive to personal well-being.
The confusion in Stefan Iordache's life is accompanied by the social changes preluding the World War II, so the dream becomes more and more a gold lame fabric stained with blood. The final scene of the movie is a comprehensive metaphor for both fascism and communism erupting as a flood of dirty water from underground. The personal drama of having the dream killed by reality takes over the whole world and there is no escape from the mundane rush of history.
Artfully made, "Glissando" is not only one of those films about the human condition that follow one years and years after one sees it. It is also a directorial and scenographic masterpiece. Scenes like the one with the old men in the bathhouse could be seen as separate films, as unforgettable lessons of cinematographic art.
