Director's Cristian Nemescu life was cut off so early, and all consistent work that is left is the unfinished 'California Dreaming' and this mid-sized film which is probably his best. As other colleagues from the new generation of Romanian directors Nemescu was inspired by the period of wild transition that Romania went through after the fall of the Communist rule, a period in which democracy and opportunities freedom brought were shadowed for the majority of the Romanian citizens by economic uncertainty, moral decay and the emergence of a new generation with little relations to the past and without the guidance of any tradition or help from the broken souls generation of their parents.
Marilena is a prostitute in a Romanian city today who lives a harsh life of servitude where her hopes are relegated to the hopeless love to the wrong guy. She is loved in secret by a teenager who goes through the pains of coming of age, but the coming of age seems to be not only only his personal one but also the one of the whole society around. Yet in this harsh environment sentiments exist, and here Nemescu is inspired of a whole tradition of Romanian literature and film which found in slums and the world of criminals and prostitutes a human universe worth to be explored. That these feelings end in tragedy says something about the times the characters live in.
The film legacy of Nemescu can unfortunately be counted in screen minutes. What is left is only making us painfully miss the great director that he could have become.
