“That’s life” is often heard throughout Lucian Pintilie’s adaptation of Ion Băieșu’s novel The Oak. It’s such a sweeping response to the grotesqueries that mark everyday life amid the death throes of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship, during which the film is set, that it practically becomes a shibboleth. The words may seem little more than a verbal shrug, but in the mouths of Pintilie’s characters, full to bursting with lust for life, they express a liberatory side of absurdism that goes beyond mere politics. That the meaning and the mechanisms of their lives are unknowable is as much cause for jubilation as despair.
Fittingly, The Oak opens with a death—that of Truica (Virgil Andriescu), former colonel in the Securitate (Romania’s secret police agency during its communist regime) and father to Nela (Maia Morgenstern), the film’s protagonist. As his caretaker, Nela projects for him...
Fittingly, The Oak opens with a death—that of Truica (Virgil Andriescu), former colonel in the Securitate (Romania’s secret police agency during its communist regime) and father to Nela (Maia Morgenstern), the film’s protagonist. As his caretaker, Nela projects for him...
- 4/24/2023
- by William Repass
- Slant Magazine
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