I saw this at the independent cinema on the 11th of April, 2024.
Honestly, mid to bad. It was amateur in every sense of the word - clearly created with talent and drive and a message (and a keen understanding of characterisation) but the editing was sloppy and sometimes actively awful and it was overlong by at least an hour and a half.
It follows a sparkling, foul-mouthed and fiery young woman who works as a personal assistant to a filmmaker making a safety film for an Austrian furniture company warning people to wear protective equipment.
The first part follows a single day as she drives around Bucharest (the driving sequences are frequent and interminable), meeting candidates to tell their stories for the camera, picking up supplies, attending a meeting, and eventually picking up the Austrian company’s representative from the airport and conversing with her.
Interspersed are scenes from an old Romanian film called Angela merge mai departe from 1981. These were genuinely charming, with lovely lighting and cinematography, and reminiscent of old Bollywood films in the camera style and colouring.
The character was clearly a labour of love for the script writer, with myriad quirks and issues. She spent a lot of time filming outrageously explicit and misogynistic satirical videos in the style of Andrew Tate, always had a dirty joke or politically pointed story for her interlocutors, and was kind to her mother.
Nevertheless, the car scenes were painfully long (although my friends reassure me that they were representative of actually driving in Bucharest), and at one point there was a five-minute sequence of stills of crosses along a particularly dangerous road. Whatever poignant point there may have been was washed out by the two-minute mark, after which I (for the first time ever) seriously considered getting up and leaving.
The second part of the movie was much better, and was a single unbroken shot for an hour or so showing a filming session of one of the candidates telling his story of how he was injured. The conversations with the company’s representative looking to cover their ass were painfully and enragingly satirical, and the entire scene represented a slow unravelling of all the hopes that were pinned upon the candidate at the start; of getting to tell his story and hold the company’s negligence to account.
The characterisation was compassionate throughout, and there’s a genuinely good movie hidden in there somewhere. It needed a far better editor and a much shorter runtime.
I did like the credits, they were all handwritten and had lovely annotations, but the long silent shots were as painful to sit through as the crosses.