Alexandru Ionașcu
When a Romanian film deals with the communist period, the narrative usually focuses on the repression of institutions of force such as the Securitate and the social mechanisms used by people to adapt to the rigors of doublethink. All activities were supervised. When you try to throw an apartment party with your high school classmates, when you are sent as a teacher somewhere in a village not on the map, when you make photos, when you have sex with your partner after having turned her to the militia, when you sell bottles with your partner to make extra money, when you start an extramarital affair or when you are looking for someone who knows the ins and outs of illegal abortions, over all these trivial things the security thrones, whatever you do there is a good chance that the security is on your tail. This is the image of communist Romania that movies like Metronom (2023) or the anthology Memories of the Golden Age (2009) seek to present as something common for those times, a kind of postcard with several stamps from the Golden Age. Before the Revolution, security was in power, so security wins, as they say. Then Tudor Giurgiu came along and nothing was the same.
Libertate (Freedom) (2023) is the first Romanian feature-length film to present communism (the end of it, at least) from the perspective of the defeated, those who lost power. I mean the security and militia workers. Also, Libertate is probably the first Romanian movie focusing on communism that is not set in Bucharest, which is commendable. It’s about time that Romanian movies stopped focusing so much on Bucharest and started looking for other urban and social settings for those dramas about ordinary people caught up in historical transformations, forced to understand something of those transformations. And the ordinary people in this movie by Tudor Giurgiu are the militia and security workers caught in the midst of the chaotic violence of the days of the Revolution. The Sibiu Revolution, to be precise.
On December 21-25, 1989, the events in Timișoara and Bucharest spread to this small town in southern Transylvania, locals took to the streets to protest against the regime, and in a militia (or security?) building, employees don’t know whether to open fire on the protesters or try to negotiate with them. The militiamen’s dilemma ends when the protesters enter the building and capture the militiamen. Captives of the institutions of force of the time are held in a swimming pool, constantly subjected to psychological torture by the military and threatened with execution. Apparently, in Sibiu, the Romanian Revolution took a strange turn, with the city’s security and militia being besieged by protesters, and then the workers from these structures being captured and interrogated for almost a month. But what’s the difference between the two? Are security and militia synonyms? Did these structures of authoritarian socialism of the last century have anything in common?
For those of you who are zoomers and millennials (including late millennials like me), it is useful to note that the word “militia” in those days meant the institution that was in charge of public order and discipline, the observance of traffic laws, the protection of property and property. What we now call the police. The Securitate, on the other hand, was an institution with its own functioning, with the aim of defending the regime and repressing opponents, an internal secret service. As you can see, I am only making general and, one might say, personal distinctions here. As can be seen, since I am a late millennial, I can’t be bothered with any detailed description, much less anything technical or specialist. Besides, specialized details about the organization, functioning and purposes of these pre-1989 structures make no sense in this film anyway, as soon as Tudor Giurgiu seeks to capture the chaos of those days at the end of the era, i.e. the end of Romanian communism. So it doesn’t matter whether we are dealing with secret policemen or militiamen, as soon as all these employees of the repressive forces find themselves in the same situation, attacked by the army and protesters.
In the same way, for those who take to the streets, there is no difference between security and militia, they are all representatives of an odious regime, so they are treated the same. At one point, when one of the captives in the swimming pool says that he is not a security guard, a protester replies smugly that he is a security guard and a militiaman, there is no difference, all the same, all the same, all the same, all the same, all the same. Among those trapped in the swimming pool, slivers of life continue even in moments of tension and uncertainty, socializing, discussing the escape and, interestingly, who and where it was shot from. It seems that the debates and discussions about who shot who have been going on since the first days of the Revolution, most of the discussions of those in the pool revolve around questions such as who, where and when did the first shots were fired, where was each participant when the first shots were fired, who are the terrorists? Questions that no one can find answers to, everything remained one big question shrouded in a mystery inside an enigma.
Unlike other movies about the Romanian Revolution (see Hârtia va fi fi albastră), Tudor Giurgiu’s last year’s movie captures the everyday cruelty a community can show in extreme, crisis situations, when political leadership disintegrates and the administration disappears. What is also known as social breakdown, on December 21-22, 1989, manifested itself in chaotic shootings by frightened soldiers, people killed by who knows who and/or people detained for the stupidest reasons for which no one deserves to be deprived of their liberty.
In Sibiu during the days of the revolution, women were detained separately from men in the swimming pool – I remember the scene in which Mirela Oprișor’s character talks to a woman who was detained and learns that she had been arrested when she was coming out of a bank and the soldiers suspected that she had a “transmitter in her pigtail”. In another scene, Dan Bordeianu’s character thinks he’s out to eat “salami made from human flesh”. But the most widespread rumor of those days is the one about “poisoned water”, then the paranoia about terrorists.
Who are the terrorists? Nobody knows. Such outbursts of the irrational could also be seen in the first year of the pandemic, when many social media commentators and an entire political party thought there was no pandemic. Curious thing, but it seems that home-grown conspiracy theories have been appearing since the early days of the establishment of democracy in Romania.
One of the main roles in the movie belongs to Alex Calangiu, an actor from Craiova’s National Theater. Alex Calangiu’s character is called Viorel Stănese, a militiaman who finds himself in the unusual situation of being besieged and detained with his colleagues in a swimming pool that has been drained of water to serve as a collective prison for militiamen and possible secret agents. Viorel Stănese is the ordinary militiaman who conscientiously goes to work, i.e. the militia, promises his wife that he won’t play the hero and, when it all goes down the drain, all he wants to do is get home for a baptism on January 7. What we would all do when there is a violent change of political regime.
Viorel Stănese is a perfectly ordinary militiaman, so ordinary that he rejects any insinuation that he is a security guard and not a militiaman. Just as he doesn’t just want to get baptized, but also to do his duty and defend the unit. Alex Calangiu approaches this role of the ordinary militiaman through three fluid attitudes: in the beginning, before he is captured by the revolutionaries, his bodily presence in space tells us that there is a determination and belief that everything will end and things will be as before. During his imprisonment, we see a character trying to figure out what is going on, only to discover after his release, when he thinks he has figured it out, that in the new landscape, a militiaman like him is really a figure that arouses opprobrium and the saying about doing good is a bit true.
Alex Calangiu brings a balanced dose of awe and fear, all under the guise of a vulnerable masculinity, an ordinary man, caught up in not at all ordinary events. With his back to the camera in the last sequence in which this character appears, we can understand that militiamen can also be affected by post-traumatic stress syndrome. We don’t see the same vulnerability in the other characters, but more dissimulation. The look in Alexandru Papadopol’s eyes both before and during his captivity reveals a character who has not lost much of his confidence in the continuity of his career – knowing, by the wink, that those protesters don’t really know what to do with their freedom.
Of all the panoply of characters (an ensemble cast) in this film, Mirela Oprișor plays the character with the most strength of character, courage to face traumatizing events in order to learn something about her husband. Mirela Oprișor’s Stela is probably one of the strongest female characters in post-communist cinema. Strength of character without duplicity, that is. You can see Mirela Oprișor in Las Fierbinți, while Alex Calangiu stars in shows like Heart and Other Meats. Certainly, Tudor Giurgiu has taken a certain risk in choosing to portray workers in communist power structures such as the militia as banal people, interested in their own families and bewildered by events, with no idea what will happen the next second.
Tudor Giurgiu has made that movie about communism in which security is in the water (I know, there’s no water in that pool, but it sounds better than security is on the ropes), on the wrong side of history or out of history. We’re a far cry from that good security guy, bad security guy in Metronom, you might say. From time to time, a movie like Libertate appears in Romanian cinema, with some razor-sharp observations on the most banal lives. In other words, movies like Libertate are why I love movies. In addition to the razor-sharp banality of communist institutions and blocks, note how Libertate also tells us two other important things about Romanians: Romanians can’t really reach consensus and will argue interminably just for the catharsis of interminable arguments. Lambada heard on black and white TV is about as dubious as you’d expect it to be.
Photo: Libertate (2023), directed by Tudor Giurgiu, with: Alex Calangiu, Iulian Postelnicu, Cătălin Herlo, Mirela Oprișor, Toma Cuzin
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