Alexandru Ionașcu
Weddings are some of the most important events for Romanians, which means they can be a big hassle. You never have the right outfit (or even know what to wear), you don’t know what kind of gift to give to the bride and groom (I’ll come back to this), and you don’t know how long you should stay at the wedding. And if you’re also invited to that religious wedding (or ceremony? I never knew what that moment is called when the bride and groom and guests are in the church), then you’ll really be confused by everything that’s going on at the event called wedding that’s going on around you. But when you have to have the wedding in what is called a rural environment, hence dubious traditions, everything is even stranger. And when Soviet troops are swarming around, then you know you’re living in a time when weddings really are something memorable. At least, that’s what actor-turned-director Horațiu Mălăele is trying to tell us in his 2008 movie The Silent Wedding (Nunta Mută).
I was in the last month of summer, I had just passed all my baccalaureate exams, I was about to start university in two months’ time and every evening I was talking with some friends about various things, including movies. It was from those neighborhood friends that I first heard about a Soviet director named Paradjanov, some Stanley Kubrick movies I hadn’t seen yet, and dubious stuff like Giant Shark vs. Huge Whale. On one of those evenings, the brother of one of them told us about a Romanian movie in which some newlyweds are forced to hold a wedding without making a sound. The reason? Stalin had died and a week-long mourning had been declared, with all public activities postponed. The premise seemed to me at the time rather childishly ridiculous, why couldn’t someone simply postpone that wedding? Or drop the wedding part? Of course, in Romania that could never happen, so a wedding á la Roumain cannot be canceled for anything in the world, and who better to convince us of these realities than Horațiu Mălăele? In 2008, he made his directorial debut with Nuntă Mută, a movie that can be described either as a literary-cinematographic exercise that is meant to be an interesting and original original, or as a curious contribution to the last waves of anti-communism in culture 10-15 years ago. I would describe it as one of the worst movies in the history of Romanian cinema.
Nuntă Mută is one of those movies that reaches that hard-to-reach area for a movie: it can be seen only once. If one were to see it a second time, one would automatically feel nausea and lose faith in humanity. Everything about this movie is wrong, from the lines to the characters to the premise. The characters are unbelievably stupid and Horațiu Mălăele has managed the feat of taking the most offensive stereotypes from the Romanian mind. Misogynist stereotypes abound in this movie, contempt for a character with dwarfism and a lot of racism, the whole panoply of prejudices tries to outline a kind of original and traditional anti-communism. But this film tries so hard to be anti-communist that it manages to justify all the patriarchal-abusive behaviors in Romanian society before urbanization – also called the rural environment. Domestic violence is justified by appealing to the supposed innocence of the countryside (Marin Preda did nothing else in his novels about the family of the Moromeții) and the villagers at the center of this film are presented as radically opposed to any form of progress, and Horațiu Mălăele even goes so far as to present the opposition to progress of the rural people as something to be admired. Sounds exactly like the idiosyncrasies of the anti-communist right, you’ll say, and it is, but what happens in this movie?
A film crew is looking for a suitable location to film a documentary on the supernatural and come across a woman in a wedding dress. From there it all slides like a snowball on a snowy winter day. From mayor Valentin Gogonea (George Mihăiță), the film crew learns the tragic story of a village over which the communists have built a factory. Why did they do this? In the spring of 1953, Iancu (Alexandru Potocean) and Mara (Meda Victor) decide to get married. As is often the case with Romanian weddings, the two families agree to the nuptials, put aside their disagreements and plan a big wedding. Which means a lot of dishes that everyone warned you to avoid because of their high cholesterol content. This being a wedding in rural Romania, health is the last thing on everyone’s mind, and the wedding must last for many days. If looking after your own body can’t postpone a wedding, the Soviets certainly can: Stalin is dead and the mourning lasts for a week and all events, including weddings, are stopped. The wedding still has to take place, so it will be held in secret, no one will say a word, the band will have their instruments covered with rags, the glasses will be wrapped in other rags and there will be whispering. Mara can no longer stand this silent atmosphere, the wedding becomes noisy and the Soviets intervene. A real mystery why this character couldn’t get used to a wedding without words or music, as soon as the bride and groom received that gift in many banknotes. As that little known socialist writer used to say: if that gift in money was banned or taxed, Romanians would probably stop doing weddings. Sad, but possibly true.
Not much can be said about the rest of the movie. It is, without a doubt, the worst Romanian anti-communist movie of the 2000s. This movie will make you regret paying the money for the ticket (at the time), or searching for it online (as you would do now, although it’s hard to say why anyone would want to watch this movie on YouTube). Some T-34 tanks in CGI like we’re in a Call of Duty level, Șerban Pavlu playing who knows what kind of character and a lot of sexism. There’s a good chance that Nuntă Mută will be the most predictable movie in the history of Romanian cinema, a movie more predictable than the record temperatures caused by climate change. This is the kind of movie that will ruin your whole day and make you hate forever, with a passion, everything that the Romanian countryside has ever meant. It’s somehow Moromeții only in the ’50s, and instead of the Fonciere, the Soviets would come.
The Silent Wedding (Nuntă mută) (2008), director: Horațiu Mălăele, with: Meda Victor, Alexandru Potocean, Luminița Gheorghiu, Alexandru Bindea, Victor Rebengiuc.
Photo: The poster of the movie The Silent Wedding (source: Wikipedia Commons, Fair Use)
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