Between two episodes of the extremely personal (and pertinent) trilogy about the anticommunist resistance in the mountains,
Constantin Popescu indulges in a less dramatic and rather sarcastic urban & actual gap, based on a screenplay penned with the already famous exuberance of
Răzvan Rădulescu and Alex Baciu, who already cowrote, with
Radu Muntean,
The Paper Will Be Blue,
Boogie and
Tuesday, after Christmas. The daily nothings that add to an everyday man's drama can add up to an even bigger nothing - you need lots of talent, subtlety and irony to turn that big nothing into a film that also means something. Fortunately "the parents" of this film not only don't miss them but, on the contrary, have them in spades. Besides these features/qualities both evident and indisputable, the main appeal of the film is called
Vlad lvanov. After the small but powerful parts played in
Cristian Mungiu's
432 and
Corneliu Porumboiu's
Police, Adjective, here he is, in his first main role - and what a role this is! Velicanu is not a character one can empathize with (he's ill mannered, he doesn't accept contradictions, he always has an answer ready and he treats everything and everyone with an almost offensive irony) but a character who, as shocking as it may sound, one can understand - generally speaking, he's surrounded by bigger idiots. Velicanu is a man who's just starting to grasp that he already lost the game (although he will never accept it), a man who seizes onto details with the despair of a drowning man fruitlessly grabbing a life preserver even though we're in the middle of the ocean, a man whose principles are placed on a twisted structure which could crumble at any moment.
Liviu Mărghidan's camera, so shaky in
Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man, follows Velicanu discretely but determinedly - and the filmmaker's intelligence forces you to solve the puzzle (which could easily be called "the tragedy of a ridiculous man") as shown on the box, piece by piece, slowly and irrevocably. And speaking of
les pieces de resistance, the film has two, a bravura explosion set to a somehow iconoclastic piece of 80's Romanian rock (which could be comical if it weren't so sad) and an explosion of fury which comes exactly when you think the fuse has already been put out. An impressive performance for Ivanov - the final shot captures his frowning expression, his piercing eyes obstinately placed forward, eternally triumphant in a fight in which the winners are those who lose.
