Love in the time of neoliberalism is a particular drag. Where can passion fit into anyone’s life when we’re crushed under the skyrocketing cost of living as the false dream of equality under free trade agreements and globalism have been revealed to be a fraud? These are conversations that, for this reviewer, have been happening with more frequency in recent years and Sarra Tsorakidis has tapped into the zeitgeist with her devastating debut, Ink Wash. Sharply attuned to the emotional fallout of economic collapse, this patient picture is a searing slow-burn about the vultures that capitalism has made out of us all.
From the start, the film’s deeper concerns float on the surface, but don’t immediately leave their sting. Lena (played by the film’s co-writer Ilinca Harnut) is a painter and mural artist enduring the bumps and bruises of a midlife transition. She has decided to go legit and apply for a job at her brother-in-law’s graphic design firm. As if this swap of an art career for corporate life isn’t enough, she’s getting over a still fresh breakup with an ex-boyfriend who has quickly moved on to someone younger. As much for the work as a chance to get away, she leaves Bucharest for the countryside, and takes up a job painting a mural for a luxury hotel that’s being constructed inside the shell of an old, brutalist building.
At first, the location’s bucolic sentence and the isolation it affords is a welcome change for Lena. But soon, she falls into a relationship with Asger (Kenneth M. Christensen), one of the Danish managers of the project. And when her artistic partner can’t make it, a Syrian migrant named Roni (Radouan Leflahi), part of social program for refugees that’s associated with the hotel’s backers, becomes Lena’s assistant as she works on her piece.
The aesthetic imprint of Radu Jude — who Tsorakidis served as assistant director on several of his films — is felt throughout. From the wide, unblinking, and beautiful work by cinematographer Radu Voinea to the steady cutting by Smaro Papaevagelou, Ink Wash feels like a hybrid of early Romanian New Wave with a fresh vision of what contemporary cinema from the country can be. And it’s through these careful, stylistic choices that Tsorakidis slowly reveals the growing mold of fury curdling inside Lena. She grows to learn that Roni isn’t his real name; that the workers at the social program just stuck him with that nickname because of a soccer jersey he was wearing. That’s not to mention the larger hypocrisy of assisting migrants only to place them in service positions that exacerbate income disparities. She then begins to question the motives of the firm whose land grabbing, tourist ambitions are moving well beyond the hotel. And finally, Lena wonders if Asger’s attraction to her, while genuine, isn’t reflexively a form of capitalist patriarchal rescue; the upper class Dane sweeping a lowly Romanian artist off her feet.
With her art described by one admirer as containing a “maelstrom of feelings underneath” its entrancing surface, so too is Ink Wash. It wonders if love can be a form of exploitation, it mourns a country that sees its best workers go abroad for better wages, leaving behind them the groundwork for corruption. One afternoon on a hike through the woods, Lena passes around the back of the hotel and notices a large fissure in the ancient, concrete block. It’s symbolic of the feeling running through Romania and through her own psyche. Ink Wash accumulates into a powerful drama that yearns for a nation to find its footing, and sympathizes with those who have to make the hard choice to leave it. The film doesn’t offer any answers, and how could it, when the world won’t stop giving us new questions to be answered every single day.
Director: Sarra Tsorakidis
Screenplay: Sarra Tsorakidis, Ilinca Harnut
Cast: Ilinca Harnut, Kenneth M. Christensen, Radouan Leflahi
Producers: Anca Puiu
Cinematography: Radu Voinea
Production design: Alma Ungureanu
Costume design: Alma Ungureanu
Editing: Smaro Papaevagelou
Sound: Alin Zabrauteanu, Ionut Geadau
Production companies: Mandragora (Romania), Bad Crowd (Greece), Angel Films (Denmark)
World sales: Shellac
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Discovery)
In Romanian, English, German, Danish
91 minutes
