The Treasure

In Bucharest, a civil servant named Costi gets a strange proposal from his neighbour Adrian. There may be treasure buried at Adrian's grandfather's house in the country, hidden before communism. Money is needed to hire a metal detector. Costi agrees. Three men go to dig up a garden over a weekend. Corneliu Porumboiu writes and directs. Toma Cuzin plays Costi. The method is characteristic of the Romanian New Wave: long takes, a fixed camera, natural light, no music. The digging is shown at something close to real time, and the technical explanations of the man operating the detector are never cut. The subject is a treasure hunt and the film is not adventure but bureaucracy. Permission is required to dig, the state takes a share of anything found, the detector man's fee is negotiated, and a rule appears at every step. Porumboiu builds that as comedy. Behind it is Romania's recent history: expropriation, property changing hands, and what families buried. The idea of the treasure comes from there and rests on an actual social memory. It screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2015 and won a prize there. Who it is for: viewers who like Romanian cinema and dry humour. Who it is not for: the pace is very slow, almost all of it takes place in one garden, and the ending is deliberately unsatisfying.