'That Trip We Took with Dad' (the Romanian title is 'La drum cu tata', the German title is 'Die Reise mit Vater') is Anca Miruna Lazarescu's 2016 debut feature film. The director was born in Romania but has lived in Germany since childhood and was formatted in German film schools. 'That Trip We Took with Dad' is a film with a strong personal touch, inspired by the story of the life of the director's father and her family, possibly a kind of farewell to a past and complicated stage of her own biography. It is also an opportunity to recall a key moment in European history (the invasion by the USSR and some of its allies of Czechoslovakia in 1968) and the way it was lived in Romania and by the Romanians. I lived in that era and I was close to the age of the youngest of the film's heroes.'That Trip We Took with Dad' seemed interesting and authentic to me, almost a missed opportunity to be a great film.
The perspective is probably unique for most viewers, both because of geographical and cultural differences, but also due to the passing of half a century and the changes that have taken place during this time. In one of the key lines of the film, Ulrike (Susanne Bormann), a young German woman from the FRG tells Mihai, her Romanian friend (Alexandru Margineanu) 'You are very different'. The mentality gap caused by the different historical experiences of the same young generation in the two parts of Europe in 1968 is one of the central themes of the film. Mihai and Emil Reinholz, who had gone on a car trip to the German 'Democratic' Republic to find a surgeon to operate on their father, arrive, in the whirlwind of events after the invasion of August 22, 1968, in the 'free world' , ie in the Federal Republic. Young Romanians admire the reformist movement of the 'Prague Spring' and oppose the Soviet intervention and the re-Stalinization of Eastern Europe (including Romania). The young Germans they meet belong to the confused generation of 1968, admire socialism and ignore the realities of its application on the other side the Iron Curtain. They are united by their idealism, their aspiration for freedom and the music of the Beatles and the Stones, they are separated by their historical and life experiences and especially by their ignorance of the realities 'on the other side'. The Reinholz family is not without its contradictions either. The elder boy, a doctor, is obliged by the Romanian Securitate to be an informant in order to receive the right to travel and save his father. The West does not receive him with flowers either, and life there seems to demand similar compromises. The father is a former communist sympathiser, disappointed by the realities. Returning to Romania at that time, that path that was actually chosen by many who were in this situation, meant resuming the struggle for survival and a wait of another over 20 years until gaining freedom, along with all Romanians, at the fall of communism in 1989.
The story is interesting and the construction of the script is clever. The approach could be criticised for Manichaeism, the characters are drawn and judged from the start, but let's not forget that this is a personal perspective. For those who lived in communist Romania and for their descendants who talked to their parents and who know history well, it is clear who were the 'good guys' and who were the 'bad guys'. Some of the situations described in the film give the opportunity for memorable scenes (the children's games in the courtyard of the building in Arad, the Soviet tanks that almost crush the heroes, the conflicts in the East German detention center, the boys' song and the father's dance at the meeting with the German 'leftists'). I think that if the film had insisted on these directions, emphasising even the satire and the grotesque, the result could have been even more remarkable. Even so, I can only admire the performances of the team of actors with Alexandru Margineanu and Razvan Enciu in the role of the two young Romanians of German origin, whom I recognised as two fellows of my generation. Ovidiu Schumacher is also very good in the role of the father, and Susanne Bormann credibly plays the role of Ulrike, the young German of noble origin and with revolutionary sympathies. 'That Trip We Took with Dad' is an interesting film that manages to provide a personal perspective on the events of 1968 and to be a true document for those who did not live that period. For Anca Miruna Lazarescu this may be the start of a great career as film director.
