Reviews: "12:08 East of Bucharest;" "Fierce People"

By Max Goldberg/indieWIRE

A sidelong look at the past in “12:08 East of Bucharest.”

The title of Corneliu Porumboiu’s Camera d’Or-winning debut is a set of coordinates on the axes of history and place: “12:08” referring to the time dictator Nicolae Ceausescu stepped down from power, and “East of Bucharest,” the place where, 16 years later, the revolution remains spectral. Porumboiu’s narrative structure is similarly bisected, with the first half’s deadpan kitchen-sink comedy setting the stage for the more daring theatrical play of the second half’s elongated scenario: pompous Jderscu (Teo Corban) discussing the events of 1989 with two small-town pilferers on his no-budget TV talk show. Professor Piscoci (Mircea Andreescu) claims to have rushed the town’s square before 12:00, a point significant in that it would indicate there was a genuine homegrown “revolution” rather than a simple reaction to national events.

And then the calls start pouring in, most questioning Piscoci’s story and character; the whole town knows him as a boorish drunk, though he’s significantly sober throughout the film, heaving with regret and disgust (for the provinciality of the villagers, and for himself for remaining amongst them; all of his former colleagues are either dead or in exile). Turning the notion of the revolution not being televised on its head, Porumboiu allows wisdom about the relationship between the personal and political, history and meaning emerge slowly, usually in the gaping silences between accusatory tirades. “We make whatever revolution we can,” wise fool Manescu (Ion Sapdaru) mutters towards the end of the interminable broadcast. Poetic, cutting sentiments likes these mesh with notes of comedy: the way the old man nervously folds paper cranes on the air, for instance, or the hopelessly amateur camera zooms and angles which frame the news program. It’s in this interplay of tones that Porumboiu seems not just an apt satirist but a knowing humanist as well, a tonic all the more impressive for his youth (he’s 32). The film’s final series of dusky compositions trace the town’s streetlights turning off, neatly echoing the opening with the added symbolic weight following a story about the way history is never instantaneous. “The revolution was calm and beautiful,” Manescu narrates, in one last sidelong look at the past.

Griffin Dunne’s “Fierce People” exists in a blighted nether region between Wes Anderson’s mannered whimsy and Harmony Korine’s planned idiocy.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is an indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot. It was originally published Sept. 7, 2007. The film opens the Bay Area this Friday.]

It’s rare that a film as initially unfocused and scattershot as Griffin Dunne’s mock-ethnographic “Fierce People” would halfway redeem itself through the introduction of an anal rape/revenge narrative — but here we have it. Discussion of redemption in this case is tricky — it’s not as if the two halves of this decidedly odd film display a marked difference in filmmaking and performance quality, but the whole enterprise does become a much more energized affair once the crime has been committed. However, my positive reaction to the “added value” Dunne serves up in “Fierce People”‘s latter portions may have less to do with its narrative necessity than with the extra oomph of purpose it lends a movie that seems content for its first hour to merely drift. That, or perhaps the sheer novelty factor of finding such a bizarre story strand grafted into a generally conventional and familiar work.

Existing in some blighted nether region between Harmony Korine’s planned idiocies and Wes Anderson’s mannered whimsies, “Fierce People” has all of the hallmarks of that magical realist genre that finds folks of different classes forced to intermingle; here we have the working class masseuse Liz Earl (Diane Lane) and her son Finn (Anton Yelchin), who come to live at the pastoral Osborne estate populated by patriarch Ogden (grandly played by Donald Sutherland), grandson Bryce (Chris Evans), and granddaughter Maya (Kristen Stewart). Drug-addled Liz receives a wake-up call that her life’s on the wrong track when Finn gets busted while scoring her some cocaine and calls in a favor with Ogden (apparently Liz provided him something of a life-saving massage a few years prior) that results in the Earls’ summer-long “medical” residency at the Osborne family’s sprawling manor in upstate Jersey.

By that point (about ten minutes into the film), Yelchin’s uncomfortable voiceover has already cued us in to the story’s interest in tribal culture clash. To drive this point fully into the ground, Finn’s absent father is made an anthropologist, seen via a scratchy 16mm print of a film about a violent South American tribe that Finn watches repeatedly and comments on throughout the film. This trope is easily the worst part of “Fierce People” — imagine if Altman had killed the velocity of his upstairs-downstairs examination in “Gosford Park” by rendering its machinations completely obvious through the introduction of footage from a documentary on the British underclass. If this material (in descending order of importance: the 16mm footage, references to native tribes in general, Finn’s voiceover) had been removed from the outset, Dunne might just have had a fighting chance. But as the interactions between the two families grow more complicated — Finn strikes up a relationship with Maya, begins working for Ogden alongside his mother — the tribal motif grows increasingly strained.

I haven’t read Dirk Winterbottom’s source text (he also adapted the screenplay), but there’s a general sense of overstuff about the filmic adaptation that perhaps a book rich in incident only boiled down halfway in the process of translation. “Fierce People” makes room for narratives of sexual coming-of-age, post-drug life reclamation, class jealousy, paternity, hallucinations, and an aged castrati (yep, Sutherland, sans-testes putting off an energy that leaves the entire rest of the cast struggling to match) trying to grasp some hint of the pleasures now lost to him through different tactile means. It’s all too much for one movie, but given the rarity of that, let’s call it a near compliment. “Fierce People” is generally watchable, and not to be too terribly morbid, but we won’t have a great like Donald Sutherland around forever, so catch him while you can.

[Jeff Reichert is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot and currently works for Magnolia Pictures. Reprinted with permission, copyright Jeff Reichert, indieWIRE 2007.]

topics: political film, reviews

09.11.2007