Romanian Film in London

There's something about new Romanian cinema... A certain "je ne sais quoi" that, while watching the film, and then quite a long time afterwards, makes you think of the meaning of life, relationships, society, and even recent history. Or, at least, that's the effect it has on me.

The so-called New Wave of Romanian cinema broke onto the international stage around 2004, seemingly coming from nowhere - or that's how things looked like to Western audience and film specialists. There is quite a long history of film-making in Romania, that also counts a Cannes Best Director Award for Liviu Ciulei, in 1965, for Forest of the Hanged. There is also Lucian Pintilie, the realist master who fled Romania in the early 1980s after the censorship banned the screening of all his films to date. Or Dan Pita, sidetracked when his film Sand Cliffs, a scathing depiction of the vengefulness of idividuals in positions of power, was personally banned by dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. 

Even if people might not be aware of this history, the good thing is that they are aware of new Romanian cinema, and appreciate it. And I like to believe that one of the channels that had quite a contribution towards promoting it in the UK was the Romanian Film Festival in London. From its first edition in 2003, the Festival presented some of the newest and best Romanian films, including the short and debut films of people who've become by now household names of the arthouse circuit: Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu. 

This year's edition, titled The Other Side of Hope,  takes place from 22 to 25 November, at the Renoir Cinema in Bloomsbury, a very short walk away from Russell Square tube station.

The full programme was announced recently, and it looks very promising. Beyond the Hills, the new film by Cristian Mungiu, is presented in the gala screening on 22nd November, with Principles of Life by Constantin Popescu on the 23rd, Everybody in Our Family by Radu Jude on the 24th, and Periferic, Bogdan George Apetri's debut feature film, on the 25th. As a special treat, another screening will take place on 26 November, at the European Bank for Development and Reconstruction, in the City: Medal of Honour by Calin Peter Netzer, featuring and amazing performance by Victor Rebengiuc, the lead actor from Forest of the Hanged.

I recommend warmly these screenings to all film-lovers. This is Romanian cinema at its best: superb cinematography, uncompromising stories, and also the usual dose of gallows humour. There will also be guests from Romania who will take part in Q&A sessions for every film - yet another reason for you to be there. 

Full details of the Festival are on the website http://www.rofilmfest.com. For your benefit, I include here a short Festival Trailer (edited by yours truly).

Twelfth Night and Nights

I have been to the theatre today, and not just any theatre but The Globe. I saw The Twelfth Night as Shakespeare intended it: the play was performed in true Elisabethan style by a male-only cast, using costumes, mannerisms and music of the period ("If music be the food of love..." accompanied by Dowland's Flow my Tears). 

I saw some great people at work: Mark Rylance made an incredible Olivia, floating on the stage with ease and campishness, and Stephen Fry proved to be a very good Malvolio, acting in turns like a paragon of unctuousness and a bully. Also, Roger Lloyd Pack, known to audiences all over the world as Trigger in Only Fools and Horses, was a good Andrew Aguecheek. The entire cast acted extraordinarily, keeping to the conventions and methods in existence around 1601 (as The Globe informs the audience). Given that the text allows for such additions, the actors went for laughs with various gestures: exaggerations, rude or knowing signs, sexual innuendo, slapstick, all conducive to merriment.

My first encounter with The Twelfth Night took place at some point in the 1980s, when I was too young to actually realise what was going on. The Romanian television was broadcasting the full BBC series of dramatisations after Shakespeare, and something stayed with me from that moment. I then read the play in Mihnea Gheorghiu's translation in the Works published by Editura Univers (which my parents had on their shelves), and then didn't meet with the play for a long time. That is, until Trevor Nunn's film of 1998 which I enjoyed greatly. The action is moved successfully to the 19th century, and the film goes on - like the play itself - at the leisurely pace of a romantic romp, with a memorable Malvolio played by Nigel Hawthorne. 

Some years later, in 2006, I had the chance to work as an assistant tour manager for the National Theatre of Craiova's season in Bath - with The Twelfth Night, directed by SilviuPurcarete. Nothing could be further from Nunn's romantic vision than Purcarete's semi-nightmarish (yet still funny) interpretation. Part of my duties was to feed lines on the LED-screen showing the English text, line by line by line: What country, friends, is this (return) Illyria, madam (return)... The advantage of repeating this exercise for seven or eight shows was that of bringing a certain familiarity with the original text, learning some lines, and their place in the play, by heart. 

This did not prepare me, though, for reading the play in a scholarly edition curated by the great Stanley Wells (who, by the way, was in the audience this evening), in which layers of meaning are added by explanations of the context and wordplay. A theatre scholar once said that non-English speakers can, sometimes, enjoy Shakespeare more because they are not obliged to read him in a language whose syntax and expressions are 400 years old. He was right, to some extent. But I think that anyone who loves English should read Shakespeare in the original.

The second time I saw The Twelfth Night at the theatre was a rather special one, because it had now mutated into kabuki theatre, in the vision of Yukio Ninagawa, at the Barbican (2009). Useless to say the translation worked wonderfully, with parallels between Elisabethan and kabuki conventions being rendered evident, not the least by the all-male cast and the issue of "man playing a woman who pretends to be a man". Beside these, one of the things that impressed me most was Ninagawa's decision to bring to the stage the shipwreck which is implicit in Shakespeare's text. To this end, a quite big ship put on an appearance in the opening scenes. Some images from the kabuki production (but not from the Barbican) can be seen here. 

There was also Peter Hall's Twelfth Night staged at the National Theatre in 2011, which was particularly beautiful and melancholy, played in a simple, sparsely decorated scenography, with a fantastic Rebecca Hall as Viola, Marton Csokas as Orsino, and Simon Callow as Sir Toby.

In conclusion, I recommend The Globe's production of The Twelfth Night warmly. I understood it will transfer later on this year to the Apollo theatre in the West End.

The morale of this rambling story of Twelfth Nights? Shakespeare is very good to see and/or read, no matter the language you're reading him in.