Alexandru Ionașcu
It’s no secret that in the last 8-10 years Romanian directors have developed the strange habit of releasing long films. And by long I mean films lasting over three hours by directors like Cristi Puiu or Radu Jude. Admittedly, someone could replay that three-hour long movies like Don’t Wait Too Long for the End of the World or Malmkrog are not that long, since world cinema has much longer records, like Fritz Lang’s Mabuse, the Player (Mabusse der Spieler, 1922) or an Eastern European record like Béla Tarr’s seven-hour Sátántangó. Nevertheless, the social (or rather family) realism of Romanian cinema in recent years is notable as a departure from the earlier insistence on communism. What is most striking about the films of these directors (with the exception of Cristi Puiu, who is, shall we say, right-wing, but is my favorite Romanian director) is the focus on the situation of women in Romania, from social realities to sexuality, types of misogyny, male violence, and the absurdity of Romanian bureaucracy. And the film to be discussed here is no exception. It is Bacalaureat (2016).
In a small provincial town with some of the greyest communist blocks you can imagine (you as someone living in Eastern Europe, I mean), therefore unrehabilitated and depressing, a doctor named Romeo Aldea has many worries and most of them are related in one way or another to his daughter Elisa’s baccalaureate exam. And Eliza needs to get a high mark in the exam to qualify for a scholarship to study in the UK. One day, Dr. Aldea’s daughter is attacked on her way to school. Because of this trauma, Eliza’s parents do not know if their daughter will be able to take all the exams to graduate from high school. What has the husband been doing all this time? He was with his mistress, and Dr. Romeo Aldea’s mistress is one of Eliza’s teachers. As one might imagine at this point from the narrative’s spare sketching, the father insists that his daughter go ahead with her exams, while the mother, played by Lia Bugnar, feels that the exams should now be put on the back burner.
A bit of local context. In Romania, at the end of four years of high school, all students take an exam called the bacalaureat, with tests depending on the profile of the high school (philology and foreign languages, mathematics, natural sciences), the most difficult being two or three subjects. Depending on the grades obtained and the average grade over the four years of high school, students in Romania will be able to decide which universities to apply to, so this is why the matriculation exam is called an exam preparing one for life’s struggles.
In any case, Eliza comes out disappointed from one of the exams, saying that she did not solve all the subjects, which for a Romanian student taking this exam means if not the end of the world, then certainly a disaster from which she pr he will never recover. Obviously, the father cannot let things end this way, so it is understood that he will intervene with the various people in charge to ensure that his daughter receives preferential treatment.
This film, directed by Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) and subtitled Family Pictures, is also a satire on how parents in Romania understand to show their children how institutions like education work. In other words, it is a satire of what Romanian parents understand by a concept like civic education. More precisely, if you want to achieve academic results, if you want your offspring to achieve academic results, you do not necessarily have to be correct and follow the rules, but you can always look for shortcuts to achieve those results. What this means is that you can try to intervene with various officials to get preferential treatment.
At some point the father reveals to his daughter that he intervened on her behalf. At this moment she realizes that all the parenting about how to be fair is blatantly at odds with the behavior of these adults who happen to be parents. The father’s response? If you want to achieve anything important in life, like getting a scholarship to study in the UK, you have to adapt to the mores of the place: ‘But we live where we live, and sometimes we have to fight with the guns from this plae when we can’t do otherwise’. As I wrote above, in Romanian films of the last ten years, the situation of women has been a central focus. For example, the widespread gender-based violence and the slow fight against it by the institutions, the loneliness of elderly women who have no support system, and the ease with which the trauma suffered by the women attacked is viewed by others. As in many Romanian films, the narrative is slow, with many plot sequences that build the daily kaleidoscope that a middle-aged man will go through as he juggles civic ethics and the desire to be better for his offspring.
Adrian Titieni (who plays Dr. Aldea) brings a well-controlled gravitas to the ordinary man, though dissatisfied with the reality in which he lives, but convinces you that he’s an ordinary man you see daily when he gets in his car to go to work. But the kindness by which Adrian Titieni understands the ordinary Romanian man hides a banality of sadism. For example, when the woman with whom he is having an extramarital affair reproaches him for her ambiguous situation, Dr. Aldea’s reaction shows him as a character who thinks primarily for himself, with others being secondary. By others, I mean his family. Apologies will not save his marriage.
Somewhat on the same emotional level as Adrian Titiani’s performance is Lia Bugnar. In her eyes we see that she outgrows the man in front of her. Her gaze reveals that unadulterated clarity that knows there are more important things than mere academic presentation. An importance that the daughter, played with convincing vulnerability by Maria Draguș, realizes as well. Maria Draguș’ character is connected to the plot twist at the end, when the daughter admits to her father that she has solved all the exam papers from the beginning, so all his interventions were completely useless.
The matriculation exam is a kind of a watershed moment for all students in Romania, but Cristian Mungiu’s film shows us how their parents have the annoying habit of pushing the meaning of this exam into increasingly absurd and unexpected areas. Anything can happen when parents interfere with the conduct of end-of-high-school exams. There may be somewhat expected consequences, such as phone tapping and criminal investigation. But also some, shall we say, more bizarre ones. Like, for example, the appearance of kids wearing totem masks, kind of like the characters in The Wicker Man, the Nicolas Cage version from 2006.
Bacalaureat (2016), directed by Christian Mungiu, starring Adrian Titiani, Lia Bugnar, Maria Draguș, Vlad Ivanov.
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