A nation of small wonders

Critic’s Notebook

Romanian shorts give glimpses of filmmakers’ mastery

December 02, 2011|By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

A scene from Tales From the Golden Age, written and co-directed by Cristian… (Oleg Mutu/Sundance Selects )

The title of the Romanian shorts collection “Tales From the Golden Age,’’ refers to the pungently funny urban legends the films spin from the last 15 years of Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship. But that’s a title that also sums up the improbable handful of unassuming masterpieces that have come from this small country in the last six years - Cristi Puiu’s dark hospital comedy “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu’’; Cristian Nemescu’s military satire “California Dreamin’ (Endless)’’; Cristian Mungiu’s abortion-procurement thriller “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’’; Corneliu Porumboiu’s farce of recent history “12:08 East of Bucharest’’ and his linguistic procedural, “Police, Adjective.’’ Per capita, Romania might be Earth’s greatest film industry.

Nowadays, no truly international festival is complete without it. And, of late, Cannes and Toronto and New York have been particularly instrumental in popularizing Romanian cinema - even if our moviegoing apparatus continues to attempt to figure out what to do with it. Right now, Boston is suffering a sort of cinematic back order. At least five very good or truly great films have yet to open here, including Puiu’s trap-door astonishment, “Aurora,’’ and Andrei Ujica’s ingeniously damning stock-footage assemblage, “The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu.’’

“Tales From the Golden Age’’ is playing at the Brattle Theatre tonight and Saturday, and it has glimmers of its forebears’ brilliance, wit, and concision. The film also partially closes the gap between its approach to the dour comedy of life and the one found in so-called single-camera shows like “The Office,’’ “30 Rock,’’ and “Parks and Recreation,’’ situation comedies in which the humiliations of workplace bureaucracy mirror the daily frustrations of life under a dictatorship. The pacing is slower, the camerawork less gawking, the mood less antic. And obviously, for the Romanians, the price of deviating from arbitrarily prescribed but institutionally abided protocols is much higher. Humiliation here can sting, fatally.

Anyway, Mungiu returns for this omnibus, putting the limelight on some of his friends and less heralded countrymen. He’s the credited screenwriter and shares directing duties with four others - Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Höfer, Razvan Marculescu, and Constantin Popescu. Together, they’ve focused this collection on Romania’s Communist propaganda during the Ceausescu regime.