A Place in the Sun: ”The World Is Mine” – film review
by Magda Mihăilescu
Larisa Fugaru, the protagonist of the Nicolae Constantin Tănase`s debut feature film, The World Is Mine, belongs to the family of characters that are rebel but not without a cause, which by the end of the `80s could take their influence from Vasile Piciul`s Little Vera, or closer to our days, could follow the footsteps of the Dardennebrothers`Rosetta. Small fragile creatures, vulnerable at first glance, but propelled by the energy of resisting the world that doesn`t want to let them fit in. Of course, with the changes and shades brought by the passing through the years, by the social distortions of each period and by each director`s colour of the talent. Little Vera decided to do what she wanted, she made the guys go out of their minds with her outrageously short skirts. A sex scene was meant, during those days, to defy a cinema that was stuck in grandma`s decency. Today, our rebel creature swears just like a trooper (actually, nowadays it would be more appropriate to say that the troopers swear like our college girls) and I don`t know how many of us still startle when we hear the young girls say the F word – even if, pardon my saying, there`s no way they cando it, anatomically speaking – even in front of their fathers. We reached a point of acoustic immunity. It`s not our thing here to ask ourselves how these linguistics effusions occurred. We`d better let the sociologists do it. When we are in front of a film, what`s important is for this vulgarism, if we choose to call it so, to have its share of subversiveness, so that we may take it as a natural way of a rebel communication of a generation, a mere escape, a pause for breathing, etc, beyond which there is, however, something else. If not, everything is just a plain trend and just a stirring of the lower instincts. Which, fortunately, is definitely not the case with this film – the young film director proves to be surprisingly mature. His and the screenwriter (Raluca Mănescu)`s protagonist is not a furious girl for no reason, but she doesn`t accept being wronged, humiliated, though the occasions keep coming her way: at home, at school, in friendship, in love. The girl simply wants to live a normal life, keeping up with her time, which seems not to be an easy thing. For her debut, Ana Maria Guran is quite admirable with her loose T-shirts and her hoop earrings. When she adjusts them in the mirror she looks like preparing for a fight. She`s on the screen all the time with an amazing intuition of the psychology of every moment. Most of the times you see a questioning look in her eyes, sometimes it`s a painful one, but the answers go against even the most common expectations. In her family – a mother with strange reactions who wants to get rid of her grandmother`s belongings even before she dies (“But she`s not dead”, Larisa will argue), a brutal father who is ready to hit anytime. At school – a principal with the looks of a worker takes sides with an impertinent, liar student, the daughter of a “daddy”, who is some kind of a local authority, thus openly doing our heroine wrong. The author had prepared Larisa`s breaking out, whose aggressiveness will play havoc around her. Her going to the principal`s office had been shot in ralenti, the time dilation from this sceneis opposite to the condensedtime when in her fury, the girl will overturn everything around her: teacher`s desk, chairs, acquarium. The “slowdown” will happen again a few times during the film, not always justified imperatively, but in the key moments it will be the above mentioned pause for breathing, the symbolic charging that the protagonist needs in order to continue her race. So much the more because the disappointments are not finished yet; the last one is the ambiguous love of Florin, a hunky from the neighbourhood, who is ostentatiously presented as a cocky stud.
But Larisa`s energy is not out either, she is always ready to start all over again, with a tension of a small animal that after having been hurt, licks her wounds quickly, sometimes with the cure called Facebook (“Man, all the city will find out”), sometimes with her trust in friendship. There is so much fierce vitality in this girl, that even if we had left her on the deserted beach after the terrible rape, we would have parted with her with the feeling that she wouldn`t give up. The film director chose enclosing the film among the two symbolic covers of plunging into the nightmare – the ex abrupto opening („I have bad dreams at night, I dream that I break my teeth...that my mouth is full of blood...”) with the body floating in the water, images that will be reused and amplified in the end when „I have bad dreams at night” will have a follow-up: „I know I`m not drowning...I`ll be ok, I`ll be fine, come what may in the world.” We can talk about the metaphorical inserts, about this topic of the aquatic image that connects the outflow, the nightmare of the water with the soul disaster. Perhaps the most outspoken moment, too outspoken, maybe, is the one when the protagonist comes back home and the entrance door is mentally projected as being carried away by the fury of the waves. We mark them as some exercises of style that look for their place in the means of an ambitious and promising debut.