coradenice

I found myself dazed and quite startled by this film. It's the kind of movie that haunts you with unresolved questions after it's finished and leaves you in a state of agitation and unease. This film was not intended to pose big, existentialist questions on the meaning of life, more specifically on the meaning of the characters' life, which is absent, by the way. No, their petty, stifling existence is boiling at small fire, and the futility of their lives does not end up in a grand shout for innovation and purpose, as it happens in Nikita Mikhalkov's films, for example in "An Unfinished Piece for a Player Piano" and "Five evenings", which I personally find pretty resembling to "Stranger than paradise", mainly the latter, in terms of black and white shooting and silent, pausing atmosphere. However, unlike with Nikita Mikhalkov's characters, the relationships between the characters in "Stranger than paradise" and their existential uselessness lack the tension and final outburst that might ultimately bring them to a sense and absolution. The smallness of their lives is plainly felt like an itch, discomfort, being perhaps intentionally reduced to the plain state of boredom and consciously avoiding the magnitude of anguish. Being set on this rather minimalist, superficial scale, their journey is not a quest for some revelation, self-awareness and connection, but a mere attempt to shake up their sleepiness and have fun, which results in a failure and an excessive, ridiculous airplane situation twist. But, since the characters regard their own stories in such low key, this is lamentable and perfectly bearable at once. Their search for a place filled with life, sun and colors, which is Florida, ultimately takes them to a secluded, empty beach, a metaphor for their lives. They are put together, which seems almost fated, perhaps in order to make the best of their interaction and evolve through it, so they might try to bond with each other on a deeper level; the problem is they lack emotional depth or cannot access more profound layers of being because they are too alienated from a fuller self-perspective and in comic self-denial of the sad nature of their condition. The mood of the film is perfect, slow paced and somewhat sensual with "I put a spell on you" playing in the background, the dialogs are abundant in pauses, interruptions and discontinuity, just as the three characters' stand in life is, and their absurd conversations and involuntary humor ("Hey, is Cleveland a little like, uh, Budapest?") gives more philosophical weight to the nonsense of their little "adventure" together to the outside viewer than to the characters themselves, who are too self-involved and stuck in their lives to acknowledge this mess they are in fully. A little masterpiece and a conceptual anticipation of "the show about nothing" brilliantly staged by Jerry Seinfeld.

It's such a cliché to do movies about horrible, buried truths from the communist era that come out after the (apparent) fall of communism, shyly and in vague glimpses, but only for us viewers to find out that the truth is far beyond our reach, inaccessible since the fellas coming to power after the revolution are the very same people who had the power before the revolution, only now under the deceiving mask of democracy. So it is in their best interest to stop the furious Romanian national Zorro from piecing the puzzle of these horrid stories together and revealing the outcome to the public eye. The idea of the film is not so bad, but the fiery and slight avant-garde (oh, yes, the director lamentably flirted with such techniques) of its approach makes director Carmazan's efforts to reveal irreversible injustice in post-communist Romania look clumsy and ultimately insubstantial. Unfortunately for Mr. Carmazan, he is just another stereotypical, not particularly gifted director feeding masses with the same old, recycled and overly digested facts about post-revolutionary Romania. Thank God there's the new wave of talented Romanian film-makers, Cristi Puiu, Catalin Mitulescu, Cornel Porumboiu, etc, to ace his directorial pretense out. "Report on the state of nation" is no more than Reader's Digest Hamlet for high-school cheerleaders perfecting their reading. By the way, I don't think the journalist's name, Horia, is accidental, the director must have intended that Horia should remind us of Hamlet, so beware: the H letter is a METAPHOR in this film!!! And the director also intended that this cruel, awful and merciless reality he had portrayed in his flick should highly impress us, move us, strike us, give us something to think about that we never (or seldom) thought of before (excuse me?!?), and ultimately something to be depressed about, but the truth is that, at the end of it, I found myself not seeing the point in wasting time with it. And I am a highly sensitive person; it's just that I can think of much better and common-sensed Romanian movies that lack ostentation, which touched me deeply, just as I can think of much more talented and visionary Romanian directors than Mr. Carmazan. And thank God, there are plenty of them now! All in all, as a famous Romanian scholar put it, this flick is "a shape without substance".