| Ghosts
return in Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor's latest film project, 'August', and
they return as ghosts. 'August' revisits Constantin Vaeni's 'Impossible Love',
a film made in 1983, a time of propagandistic apotheosis in Romania. There is
an oscillation at the very narrative heart of 'Impossible Love', as it sketches
an ill-fated love story that is interspersed with the grand fable of national
construction, overwhelmed and obliterated by the communist discourse of building
the future.
Deprived of narrative substance and not given the right to interiority,
the protagonists of the love story come across as figments of propaganda, agitated
victims of circumstance, their reactions preconditioned and politically over-determined:
what is described as their affectivity is a texture of ideological conditioning
and collectivized privacy. Scripted by the young writer T.O. Bobe, 'August' is
the protagonists'/ actors' exchange of letters after their separation, but also
after the 1989 Revolution, and a new episode in their inability to develop any
meaningful ties to the world. Only language has changed - TV stardom, the fixtures
that symbolize prosperity, drug abuse and ensuing violence make hasty appearances
-, but this remains disquieting world, inhabited by people not afforded the 'technology'
to explore what their lives might be or turn into, evacuees looking for points
of insertion and contact.
Decades after the breakup and a change of political
paradigm later, the two reproduce the false start the original film - true commedia
dell'arte of industrial times -, unwittingly presented. The barriers to collective
meaning are in place. People love, hate and are afraid, but they do so as schematic
embodiments of inauspicious times, snapshots of historical symptoms. As opposed
to a 'historical drama', where sentiment and conflict unfold on the background
of societal transformation, here historical shifts tear apart the possibility
of communication. This is the artists' microscopic exploration of the destruction
of solidarity, while previous projects have looked at its desolate architectural
landscapes.
Mihnea
Mircan |
