Occident

A film set in Romania. The country is post-communist. There is no work, no money, and everyone has the same thing in mind: leaving. The film is in three parts. The first is Luci and Sorina. A young couple; they are thrown out of their home, they are unemployed, and one day Sorina leaves with another man. That man is a foreigner. He will take her abroad. The second part tells the same days from someone else. A woman and her mother; a husband is being sought for her and the search grows steadily absurd. We see some scenes from the first part again here. But now they are looked at from elsewhere and their meaning changes. The third part centres on a third person and closes the circle. From there the narrative talks about its own structure: the same event, three times, for three different reasons. What the narrative is interested in is not emigration but chance: its idea is that what changes people's lives is mostly accident rather than plan, and that everyone takes their own accident for fate. The humour is dry. A funeral, a wedding, a government office and an advertising shoot; all of it told with a straight face. A cemetery scene is one of its best ideas and rests on an entirely absurd misunderstanding. The foreign bridegroom comes from the reality of the period. The narrative neither judges it nor romanticises it. This is Cristian Mungiu's first feature and is very different in tone from his later work; the language here is close to comedy. Alexandru Papadopol, Anca Androne, Tania Popa and Coca Bloos are in the cast. Cristian Mungiu wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes Romanian cinema and intersecting narrative structures. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a straight story; making the connections between the parts is left to the viewer.