Valuri (2007)

Writer-director Adrian Sitaru.

Dir:- Adrian Sitaru

Starr:- Sergiu Costache, Adrian Titieni, Clara Voda, Karen Wallet

Scr:- Adrian Sitaru

DOP:- Adi Silisteanu, Adrian Silisteanu

Producer(s):- Virginia Constantinescu

Romania has made quite an impact on European cinema over the last decade as a result of the large number of high quality short films presently being produced by a new generation of filmmaking talent. Films like Megatron, Colivia, Stopover, Strung Love and Oxygen have all managed to make inroads at International Festivals. The talented director of Colivia, Adrian Sitaru, managed to cause quite a stir with this beautifully black comedy, that inhabits the uncomfortably awkward terrain of a Ricky Gervais routine, intentionally pressing all the right buttons in a bid to see exactly where people’s prejudices are located.

The film is a deceptively simple one, taking place over the course of one afternoon on the Romanian Riviera. Remus a young gypsy male (played with good comic presence by Sergiu Costache in his first screen appearance) is moving around the beach resorts in his homemade ‘Zidan’ vest, being viewed suspiciously by all that he comes into contact with, until he stumbles upon an elegant Swiss tourist (Karen Wallet) and her handicapped son. The Swiss woman, who is clearly wanting a little respite from her child, locks on to the attention that Remus appears to be paying her son. Remus actually looks disgusted by the child, who lolls around awkwardly upon a beach towel. However the Swiss woman engages Remus in French, clearly making the assumption that his bronzed skin is of Arabic or North African origin and therefore the man is more likely to know her language. Remus makes a stab at pretending to speak French and although the woman is a little disconcerted it does not stop her, perhaps negligently, leaving the child in Remus’s care.

A wannabe Zidane (Sergiu Costache) tries his best to put a mask on his mild disgust.

Elsewhere on the beach a Romanian couple called Victor (Adrian Titieni, a Sitaru regular of sorts) and Ica (Clara Voda, who is scarily convincing) lie sunbathing whilst their children mess about around them. Ica casts her disapproving glare upon an older man who is receiving lavish attention from a much younger woman. Victor partly joins in her disapproval, whilst also taking a good, long, voyeuristic look at the odd couple as they roll around in the sand beside them. For Ica it is a reflection of what democracy has brought to Romania – ‘godless people’ – whilst for Victor it could simply be the activities of foreigners. Either way there is a sense that the couple are stuck in an older mode of thinking that seeks for external sources of change as the sites of Romania’s woes.

Victor (Adrian Titieni) allows his casual lustings to get him into all kinds of trouble. He ain't no lifeguard that's for sure.

These two plot strands are brought together in a chilling sequence that Sitaru frames in the calm sunlight of a balmy summer’s day, making it all the more unsettling and otherworldly. The event that unites these two disparate points of action has grievous repercussions for the young handicapped child. It also raises a number of moral questions about responsibility, with one person abdicating it and another, unexpectedly although not entirely convincingly, rising to the occasion. Sitaru heightens much of the tension in the middle section of this film by using a cross-cutting technique similar to that famously deployed by Steven Spielberg in the movie Jaws. Attention is shifted from right to left and back again, across the beach, as if approximating the viewpoints of the characters. The constant buzz of crowd noise normalises the rather extraordinary events and makes Sitaru’s one expressionistic piece of sound design, the gradual swelling of the waves in the otherwise calm sea, all the more poetically resonant. In a brief appended scene at the movies close Remus and the Romanian family are brought into direct contact with one another in a manner that seems to play up to their expected stereotypes, unlike in the scenes that have featured previously, making it all the more bitterly ironic.

Sitaru has since been able to follow through on the promise of his significant short film filmography with his Cannes selected debut feature Din dragoste cu cele mai bune intentii. Valuri is an excellent initiation into Sitaru’s wry worldview and deservedly won the Leopards of Tomorrow section at the 2007 Locarno International Film Festival. A version of the film is available for viewing in two parts (with English subtitles) at these links: Part 1 and Part 2. Although be warned, the subtitles are a little ropy.

The Bottom Line:- Sitaru manages to create in barely fifteen minutes a short masterpiece that blurs the lines between comedy and tragedy and ruthlessly dissects human prejudice.