Family Fortunes: Romania's The Happiest Girl in the World

One of the notable strands of Thessaloniki is its Balkan Survey section, which this year featured 15 films from countries including Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia and Turkey, often co-productions with other European industries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland (and in the case of one, Katalin Varga, with a British director at the helm, Peter Strickland), as well as a focus on Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic (Time of Miracles). It’s an area I know next to nothing about, so I was really looking forward to exploring its cinema, but at the end of the day, regrettably, I only caught one film, which is a double shame, because Romanian director Radu Jude’s The Happiest Girl in the World (Cea mai fericita fata din lume) was perhaps the freshest, most memorable work I saw during the festival.

Radu Jude’s The Happiest Girl in the World (Cea mai fericita fata din lume)

Now, cynics might argue that with substantial funding from the Netherlands, films such as The Happiest Girl in the World, like the European-financed Iranian titles that we get to see in the West, do not perhaps give the truest portrait of life in the country where they are filmed, nor reflect local viewing habits, but instead skew their reality to fit the tastes of foreign festival or arthouse audiences (Just a quick note following on from the comment  posted below by the film’s producer; at 10% of the budget, the funding from the Netherlands can’t really be considered that ‘substantial’ – I stand corrected). There might be something in this, but there’s a couple of points that are worth bearing in mind. Firstly, with the relatively small populations of most of the countries in the Balkan region (although with 21 million people living within its borders, Romania is considerably larger than others in the area, with Bucharest the sixth largest city in the European Union), many of the local industries face considerable difficulties maintaining their share of the local market and are reliant on such co-production deals. Secondly, while this particular film offers a critique of the rampant consumerism of a country in which free-market economics is still a relatively new phenomenon, the predicament of Delia Fratila, the unlikely heroine of The Happiest Girl in the World, shouldn’t be too difficult for most viewers to identify with.

Vasile Muraru delivers some fatherly advice to Andreea Bosneag

The film naturalistically documents a particular traumatic day in the life of its 18-year-old protagonist, a day which, by rights, should be cause for celebration. Delia has just won a car in a national competition held by a refreshments company after sending in three juice-bottle labels, and arrives in Bucharest with her parents in tow from the small rural town where they live. Like the other winners she gets to star in the company’s new advertising campaign, appearing alongside her prize while glugging from a bottle of orange juice while delivering the lines “I’m the happiest, luckiest girl in the world.” As soon as she arrives on set however, she starts bickering with her parents, who wish to sell the car and invest the profits in a guest house.

Violeta Haret and Andreea Bosneag

This is basically all there is to the film, which unfolds virtually in real time, as Delia is not only subjected to the haranguing of her domineering mother and father, but as the fading light ups the pressure to wrap the shoot, the director of the advertisement, who in turn is struggling to get his job done under the watchful and often disruptive gaze of the marketing agents that commissioned the campaign.It might sound like a slender premise, but the performances, particularly Andreea Bosneag’s beleaguered central turn, make for surprisingly compelling and often laugh-out-loud-funny viewing, as Delia is forced to perform take after take after failing to deliver her lines with the necessary gusto or fluffing them completely under the stress. Halfway through, someone notices that the orange juice drink doesn’t look suitably, well, ‘orange’, and so the insipid-looking tartrazine-yellow liquid is adulterated with a dash of Coca Cola for the cameras.

The glamorous life of Delia Fratila (Andreea Bosneag)

It’s the basic simplicity of the idea and the mise-en-scene that really impressed me, with most of the action unfolding on the shooting set in the heart of town; one assumes that  most of the people milling around in the background must have thought that a genuine commercial was being shot, not a dramatic feature. For me, this is one of the must-see films of the year. It has already played a number of festivals across the world since its premier at Berlin in February – yes, Toronto again, but also London Film Festival and Bristol’s Encounters, about the same time as Thessaloniki, which shows that there’s a print in the UK at the moment, and its undoubtedly gearing up for a bigger release over here. Ok, so Romanian films might not exactly be everyone’s idea of mainstream entertainment, but anyone with a genuine interest in cinema and its numerous possibilities will most certainly want to check this out.

The Happiest Girl in the World

Interest parties can watch the trailer on youtube and read an interview with the director from its Toronto screening on IndieWIRE.

Posted at 18:10 on 27 November 2009 Filed under news.

• Tagged
• Andreea Bosneag
• Balkan cinema
• Radu Jude
• Romanian cinema
• The Happiest Girl in the World
• Thessaloniki

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Iris Berben and Katharina Schüttler in Susanne Schneider’s The Day Will Come (Es kommt der Tag)

Five days back in the bitter chill of London and Greece is already beginning to seem like a distant memory. Nevertheless, I still have a couple more films I want to revisit from Thessaloniki before moving onto other things. One of the things about festivals is that, after a number of days of rapacious film-viewing, you begin to notice certain themes or trends emerging in your habits. By the end of the first weekend, I’d realised that over half the films I’d watched were from German directors, mainly due to the choice of Fatih Akin’s multi-cultural comedy Soup Kitchen as the opening night screening and the exhaustive Werner Herzog retrospective. The first Herzog film I caught which I hadn’t seen before, the hypnotic 1989 TV documentary Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun also highlighted another trend at the festival, which was the number of films either set or made in Africa. The Egyptian film Heliopolis I looked at in some length in my last posting, but there was also Sherry Horman’s Desert Flower, based on the best-selling memoirs of Somali supermodel Waris Dirie, the Belgian/French co-production of The Day God Walked Away (Le jour où Dieu est parti en voyage) directed by Philippe Van Leeuw, whose portrait of a young woman caught in the midst of the 1994 Rwandan genocide earned Ruth Nirere the best actress trophy, and Chasing Moses, a well-meaning but otherwise truly execrable offering set in Nairobi from local boy Alexandros Konstantaras – I don’t want to be too cruel as I understand the director’s motives for this amateurish camcorder atrocity was to give Kenyans a chance to star and participate in the making of a feature, but really, this was not film festival material, and to be honest, there are filmmakers in Kenya already making far superior works to this (for example, Michael Wanguhu’s excellent documentary on the new Kenyan hip-hop scene, Hip Hop Colony from 2006).

Anyway, back to Germany, a country that seems to be coming out with a lot of really interesting stuff at the moment. Susanne Schneider’s The Day Will Come (Es kommt der Tag), actually a co-production with France, also highlighted another trend in the festival, films about terrorists, also the subject of Koji Wakamatsu’s docudrama United Red Army and Filipino director John Torres’ experimental (and somewhat self-indulgent) montage of observational footage shot in Manila and Berlin, Todo Todo Teros (2006), screened as part of the Philippines Rising section. Schneider’s film bears little relation to either of these aforementioned titles, neither concerned with reconstructing the facts of true-life events like Wakamatsu’s recent masterpiece or fellow-German Uli Edel’s slickly superficial and quite unsatisfying The Baader Meinhof Complex from last year, nor a more conceptual examination of what is meant by the word ‘terrorism’ as Torres’ film. Instead it’s a character study, centred around a proud middle-aged woman, Judith, whose radical activities in the 1970s forced her to disappear off to France where she has now forged a new life living on a family-owned vineyard in the Alsace region with a French husband and son and daughter. When her daughter, Alice, abandoned as a child when Judith went underground to avoid police capture, turns up on their doorstep incognito, she is forced to confront her past.

An awkward family gathering in The Day Will Come.

I have to admit, I didn’t go into The Day Will Come with the highest of expectations, probably in part due to the rather unmemorable title, which had me referring to it as “that German film” whenever it came up in conversation during the rest of the week. The film isn’t interested in detailing the true-life activities of the German red movement of the 1970s, and starts off slowly. Just as it picks up and we’re geared into expecting a very European style of psychological suspense thriller in the vein of, say, Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, the film suddenly moves into more interesting territory as it lays open its themes of guilt, self-justification and inter-generational conflict, with a standout scene where Judith’s aged bon-vivant in-laws turn up unexpectedly for a family lunch in which Alice threatens to expose her estranged mother’s skeletons in the closet constantly threatening to career off into Mike Leigh levels of catastrophic awkwardness.

Iris Berben confronts the past in The Day Will Come

One of the most interesting things is the Alsace setting, a formerly German-speaking area of France. Even though the film doesn’t really emphasize the political motivations of Judith’s peers, she does state that theirs was a rebellion against the wartime complicity of her parent’s generation, “everything we despised incarnate”, before railing against the self-absorbed complacency of her iPod generation children who’ve never had to fight for anything and addressing the wartime resistance activities of their French grandfather as a case where underground activity is perfectly justifiable. This is something that so many seem to people forget when they violently denounce street demonstrations and political activism – back in the Edwardian period there was little support for the suffragettes, and nearer in time in the 1980s, police regularly clashed with Anti-Apartheid demonstrators, yet who today would deny women the vote or suggest that black South Africans should be treated as second-class citizens in their own country? There is a fine line between when youthful idealism tips into violent or criminal activity. Mercifully, The Day Will Come doesn’t invite us to make easy judgements on its characters, opening up arguments about the validity of the more extreme actions of the the New Left movement of the 1960s and 1970s at a time when so many of us are content to sit shrugging our shoulders impotently in the face of world events.

Katharina Schuttler as the abandoned daughter Alice

I’m not sure whether The Day Will Come has much in the way of distribution as yet. Like several of the titles at Thessaloniki this year, it played at Toronto International Film Festival in September: you can read a little more about it here. It’s a deceptively-simple slow-burner of a movie, but incredibly compelling and thoughtfully constructed with some great performances, especially Katharina Schuttler as Alice, which earned her a special mention from the jury. One of the bests of the fest for me. I hope it gets the opportunity to screen more widely.

Posted at 18:49 on 26 November 2009 Filed under news.

• Tagged
• Es kommt der Tag
• Iris Berben
• Katharina Schuttler
• Susanne Schneider
• The Day Will Come
• Thessaloniki

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Hotel receptionist Engy (Hanan Motawe) talks to friend in Heliopolis.

While I’m still on my Mediterranean buzz, with the words of Durrell still ringing in my ears, I thought I’d focus on my next pick from Thessaloniki, Heliopolis (Masr El Gedida), an Egyptian film written and directed by Ahmad Abdalla. I think it would be fair to assume that most reading this won’t be too clued up on Egyptian cinema. I certainly know I’m not. I do know Egypt boasts a sizeable commercial industry that makes films primarily for local consumption, with little if any pitched at the Western art house market. I know also that it’s been going for some decades, probably longer than anywhere else on the African continent. I also know, because I learnt this at the Q&A with the director and lead actor Khaled Abol Naga after the screening, that currently it is almost entirely entertainment-driven, and that Heliopolis is very rare example of independent production in Egypt. That’s not to say that its a cheap, low-budget offering. In fact it’s an incredibly polished looking piece that actually came about through a voluntary collaboration between a number of major stars and accomplished technical figures in the industry (the director’s background is in editing) all united with the desire to make the type of film that the mainstream couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, support.

Heliopolis director Ahmad Abdalla

I liked Heliopolis a lot. It presented a portrait of the city of Cairo and its inhabitants that I’d never imagined, modern, sophisticated, yet facing an uncertain future while gazing wistfully back at the past. It was moving, insightful, and more than a little melancholic. The multi-threaded narrative charts a day in the life of a number of different characters: a hotel receptionist who dreams futilely of living in Paris, a young couple about to set up home together as they joylessly shop for domestic appliances, a security guard who secretly befriends a stray dog for company while he stands alone in his sentry box, a doctor frustrated by red tape in his attempts to get a visa to move to Canada, and a university student, Ibrahim, researching the personal histories of the city’s ethnic minorities.

Khaled Abol Naga as Ibrahim

It is this latter strand that is the main theme of Heliopolis, which takes its title from a suburb of Cairo built by the Belgians in 1905. Once a thriving melting pot where Europeans, Egyptians, Jews and Armenians mingled freely, it stands as a microcosm for the whole country in which only traces of this cosmopolitan past remain. I should say that I’ve never visited Cairo, and that the impression I always got about the city from other people is that it is a dusty, sweltering, chaotic and exhausting place. My experience of Egypt is limited to a cruise down the Nile from Luxor to Aswan, both places that look like they’ve enjoyed considerably better days, and, returning to Lawrence Durrell, reading the four books in The Alexandria Quartet.

Modern Love: Newly engaged couple Maha (Aya Soliman) and Ali (Atef Yousef)

The image of modern Cairo presented in Heliopolis really drew my attention to this discrepancy between how I’d imagined the country through Durrell’s prose than through the reality I encountered in the more arid regions of my last trip. The film nostalgically harks back to this time when Egypt was a far more multi-cultural country than it is today, before the Europeans left en masse following Nasser’s assumption of the presidency of the country in 1954 (the events of Mountolive, the third book in The Alexandria Quartet, serve as a fictionalized allegory for the 1956 Suez crisis and touch upon the rise of pan-Arab nationalism during this period). Nasser was seen as bringing about a new era of modernization and social reform, but fifty years on, there are many in the country who seem to be questioning where it has all led.

Looking to the past: Khaled Abol Naga

This is not just some colonialist reading of the film on my part. This was a point that was emphasized during the Q&A, when Ahmad Abdalla and Khaled Abol Naga were joined on stage by a respected Egyptian film critic (whose name, unfortunately, I didn’t catch), who directly posed the question just what exactly was the revolution that brought Nasser to the world stage for, stating that modern Egypt, however you define the term ‘modern’, is more insular and less progressive-looking than it was back in the 1950s. There’s a scene in which Naga’s character Ibrahim is stopped while capturing the disappearing older parts of the city on video camera to form a visual archive, and ordered to cease filming by the police due to ‘anti-terrorist laws’. The consumerist paradises where the young couple shop for a new fridge are austere and near-desolate compared with these older, more vibrant areas, as the melting pot of the original Belgian district succumbs to modernity to be replaced with anonymous, gated enclaves for the city’s wealthier citizens. And the overall tone of the film is that each of the characters is stuck in the endless purgatory of their daily lives with little hope for the future.

Hanan Motawe

I was a little surprised that the rather scathing view of contemporary Egyptian society presented in the film, not to mention sub-stories in which several of the characters try to hook up with a local drug dealer, hasn’t fallen foul of the censors, but apparently it screened fairly widely on its home turf and has also played the Middle East International Film Festival in Abu Dhabi – it also showed at Toronto and Vancouver festivals just before Thessaloniki. It’s undoubtedly a political work, though the exact nature of its politics might be lost on audiences coming to it without the historical context provided by the Q&A. On another level though, I found the characters compelling, and their lifestyles, predicaments and general frustrations with their lots not a million miles away from those of any other major city-dweller. It was certainly intriguing enough to pique my curiosity and inspire me to learn a little more about Egypt, and also to keep my eye out for other films of its ilk, as it seems that there is a genuine desire among filmmakers there to make films outside of the commercial industry which have more to communicate than just mere entertainment. I hope the film will travel beyond the festival circuit, and advise interested parties to check out this interview with Abdalla on indieWIRE.

Posted at 19:34 on 24 November 2009 Filed under news.

• Tagged
• Ahmad Abdalla
• Egyptian cinema
• Hanan Motawe
• Heliopolis
• Khaled Abol Naga
• Masr El Gedida
• Thessaloniki

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