Serban Marinescu is one of the pin-up directors in Romanian cinema, Cinemagia listing 11 and IMDb 10 movies directed by him. In his lengthy career started in 1984, he collaborated with most of the Romanian actors which regular movie- and theatre-goers would have heard of. He uses a lot of those still alive in his most recent picture "Going to Paris with your ID card only".
The movie is done in the realist, grim style of the Romanian New Wave. There is no score, the camera moves slowly, there are frequent pauses to allow the viewer to absorb the story. During the first couple of minutes, nothing happens and yet we've learned everything we need to know about the lead character, professor Nita. He sleeps with a hat and day clothes on - because it's too cold and he can't pay for the heating, his austere home is full of books stacked all over the place but not in a bookcase. He is one of the victims of the falling of the communism, cultured but without the stamina and selfishness to make a decent living in a dog-eat-dog society.
Yes despite the attention to detail and solid cinematography, this movie has not been listed by any festival. Not that festivals are a measure of quality, but the success of the New Wave is certainly measured in festival prizes and not in audiences which have been meagre due to the misery of the stories and lack of cinematic pace.
This movie hasn't been made for the large audiences either.
The plot is full of stories inside the story, it feels like the director/ scriptwriter wanted to give 15' of limelight to all the great actors involved but the result is a hotchpotch. There is no justification of any character's actions, they just do things in their own minor sub-plots which somehow come together but not really meaningfully. Professor Nita's story would easily have fit into a 15' short, the rest of the movie is just a rant against the post-communist Romanian society. Maybe that's another reason this movie fared so poorly at festivals: it's just too "Romanian", the old stories about the University square, miners, Ceausescu, stray children have no traction outside the country. Or inside it, judging by the lack of home success too.
I don't think there was any private interest to fund a movie like this and I can't understand why the public purse would fund it either (maybe other than the names of the actors involved which should certainly not be a reason. Good actors can make a bad movie and this is a case in point). The same old rehashed stories about how bad the new is and how good the old was, the same old actors without any of the new guys being given a hand up...
