12:08 East of Bucharest (2007) is the kind of film I would generally like—a dry, satiric social commentary. But this film disappoints, to put it mildly. The first third of the hour-and-a-half movie is useless, enervating, and could be mercifully chopped. Here’s what happens in the first part of the movie. A guy gets ready for a talk show he is hosting about the 1989 “revolution” in Romania. He phones one guest, a professor, who is hung over; he phones the other guest repeatedly but gets no confirmation. The alcoholic professor goes to class and gives this essay exam question: “The French Revolution.” He pays off debts at the bar and elsewhere. An old man who used to dress up as Santa Claus agrees to do it again in an emergency, and then is asked if he’d like to be the second guest on the television talk show. This sounds more interesting in the summation than it was in the watching.
Once we get to the amateurish talk and phone-in show, the film becomes sort of watchable. But it is so slight that I was always wondering if there was something I was missing out on. That’s the problem with irony—you have to have, or understand, root values and knowledge. To take a common example, if someone says to you, “You’re a good man/woman, you are!” I cannot know whether the person is speaking directly and means you’re amazing, or whether the person is speaking ironically and meaning that you are useless, because I do not know the context. Sometimes, even if I knew the context—you’d done something that looked good to me, and the other person seemed genuinely pleased—I still cannot be sure that I understand the statement because there could be shared values you and the other person have that I don’t share. As an example, if someone says, “You’re a good man, you are!” when you marry your second wife and become a bigamist, I will think the comment is ironic, but if the speaker, unbeknownst to me, was one of those Mormon ultra-fundamentalists, the statement would have been meant as a direct, plain compliment.
If I had not known that this movie received positive comments at Cannes and the Copenhagen Film Festival, and been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, I would have thought it simply an unbelievably bad film. But I kept thinking I was missing something, and maybe I was. Pace the Independent Spirit Awards, most accolades come from Europe, and the European viewers probably know about and empathize with the Romanian and Eastern European situations in ways that I cannot.
But once the talk show got rolling and I got into it, I thought I understood the film—and was still disappointed. The film manifests two detectable themes: the failed hopes and few successes of the Romanian revolution, and the irretrievable nature of the past. The talk show host dwells relentlessly on the question of whether the alcoholic professor and his three colleagues were in the city square before 12:08 or after, because the Communist dictator Ceausescu and his wife fled by helicopter at 12:08, and if people were in the square before then, it was a revolution, and if they all came afterwards, it was something else. This one-note song that goes on and on is, as the old man notes in a fleeting phrase, stupid. So why does the film dwell on it relentlessly? To show that modern Romanians are so benighted that they can ask whether there was a revolution and not even address the real issue of whether their lives are better? I think so. Very dry, very abstract, and not funny.
posted on Monday, April 21, 2008 3:09 AM by JimBell