Romania’s Communist past, with its brutal decades of rights repression, surveillance and economic hardship under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, has become a frequent theme of the nation’s arthouse output, after films such as Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), about an illegal abortion, helped defined the country’s New Wave.
These days, amid Romania’s raging divisions and rising nationalism, the Communist years have become a relatively safe subject in cinema; a target that is not too politically controversial to malign for citizens across the spectrum. That said, there are still many dark corners of the era not much examined. Tudor Giurgiu hones in on one lesser-known episode in his historical drama Libertate, which screens in competition at Sarajevo after its world premiere at the Transilvania International Film Festival in Cluj.
It plays out during the Romanian Revolution of December 1989. “It’s done,” is the only mention of the off-screen execution of Ceausescu and his wife Elena. Our attention, instead, is on Sibiu, Transilvania. After shots are fired (whether by police or the Securitate is to this day in official contention) on protesters and the military that had swapped sides to join them, a bloody clash ensues. The final tally was 99 dead and more than 500 citizens accused of being counter-revolutionaries were detained in an empty swimming pool.
It’s the first time Giurgiu, who is behind lighter comedic fare such as Love Sick (2006) and Of Snails and Men (2012), has tackled nation-shaking events with a large-scale lens. He has bitten off slightly more than he can chew, bringing little analytical rigour or wider vision of what is at stake to reckon with the forces at play beneath this surface re-enactment.
Libertate is a title more ironic than rousing, as this is no triumphal celebration of the grassroots power of the people in overthrowing oppression and renewing hope. Its take on events is altogether more cynical and clouded, as freedom remains an unfulfilled promise, and the corrupt who indifferently fulfil their roles are absorbed back into society. The film is admirable in not artificially ordering complexity, though it feels decidedly less than radical by filtering our perspective through those who held up the system through apathy and conformity, rather than any activist vanguard of protesters. The adrenaline-led action of masses in crisis, rather than psychological interiority is the focus, though for all that the film does not feel propulsive. Shot in a dour palate of browns inside the airless corridors and crowded auditoriums of public buildings, with functional dialogue that spares no time for Romanian cinema’s characteristic verbosity, we get a sense of life and choices circumscribed, with nowhere to hide. System change here seems to roll on with its own machine-like momentum, something that happens unbidden to citizens, as impersonal a force as the weather.
From the start, we are immersed in volatility and violence along with men inside the police building, who are equally unable to work out who is firing from where as employees run for cover, fire breaks out, and dogs bark in the bedlam. This confusion by design, coupled with a preference for showing a morass of multiple, competing perspectives, with no single actor to guide us through, amounts to a frustrating experience that ultimately deflects emotional investment, as the audience becomes another casualty to the paranoia in the air and sludgy veil of misinformation. Police agents are rumoured to be dressed as military, hospital corridors are co-opted as battlefields (“You can kill them once I cure them,” snaps one doctor to armed imposters), and nobody’s motives can be trusted.
If there can be said to be any main protagonist, it is Viorel Stanese (Alex Calangiu), a Party member who has worked for the judicial police all his life, and operates as a kind of everyman, mid-level functionary. His declining fortunes bookend the film. As he puts on his officer’s hat and leaves for work on a day that would see him detained much longer than he had intended, his wife tells him not to play the hero — a stark irony, as this is a man with no qualms about blaming a dead colleague for firing his pistol, if it means he can get released quicker to make his son’s baptism. The Revolution just means lackeys like him can no longer put their heads down and muddle through, hoping to keep their hands relatively clean, as higher-ups orchestrate fear-based rule. Civic society has broken down to such an extent that those being kept at gunpoint in the pool scapegoat one another to exonerate themselves. Years of austerity measures have fueled resentments between those who had to queue for meat and those who can smoke Kent cigarettes (a common bribe currency), adding to the combative atmosphere and erupting fisticuffs. Viorel may walk free into the bleak, smashed-up cityscape — but it’s an empty attainment, quick liberty being the domain of the morally compromised, who will say anything to get out.
Director: Tudor Giurgiu
Screenplay: Cecilia Stefanescu, Tudor Giurgiu
Cast: Alex Calangiu, Catalin Herlo, Ionut Caras, Iulian Postelnicu
Producers: Oana Giurgiu, Tudor Giurgiu
Editor: Reka Lemhenyi
Cinematography: Alexandru Sterian
Costume Design: Viorica Petrovici
Production Design: Vali Ighigheanu
Production companies: Libra Films (Romania), Mythberg Films (Hungary)
Sales: Transilvania Film (Romania)
Venue: Sarajevo (Competition Programme)
In Romanian
109 minutes