Thirty years ago, Nae Caranfil penned the bittersweet post-scriptum of Romanian communism with his debut feature, „È pericoloso sporgersi”. The film will now make its returns in theaters, in a restored version.

The years pass, and the posterity of È pericoloso sporgersi is stranger than ever: like a wine that grows old and becomes more perfumed and more turbid, simultaneously. Of course, the fault ostensibly lies with the film’s style of humor – a slippery one, alternatively candid and primitive, inspired and vulgar, always adept at reminding us of the precarious status of comedy, a genre more predisposed to oxidation than any other, since it’s highly dependant on the air of the times. And we know all too well that, in the ensuing three decades, this air had all the time in the world to radically change, re-examining deeply rooted ideas about concepts such as normality, satire, and politics that, back then, were seemingly settled for good. And this is why there is a given sensation that the film, despite all of its slippages, talks to us about yesteryear with an explicit elan of anachronism – while also knowingly doing so with the nonchalance of one who has thoroughly understood that, sometimes, making mistakes means to be right about things.

Maybe with the sole exception of Lucian Pintilie’s Terminus paradis (1998) de Lucian Pintilie, there is no other Romanian production that could reach – up to the point of implosion – this blend of innocence and rottenness like È pericoloso sporgersi did. With one foot in the old world, whose ending was being celebrated by everybody in advance, and one foot in the new one, of a type of capitalism that nobody was truly prepared for, the film espouses a sweet ignorance that keeps it away from any extremes, to the same degree that it allows it to softly speak an ice-thin truth, lacking in any ideology. In 1993, during the heat of indignation and denouncements, Caranfil made a film that dared to not look back in anger, that was careful with the fine and disposable matter that constitutes the former lives of entire generations: dirty jokes and political innuendo, a true arsenal of nothingness and of immediacy that acts with impunity, from downwards up, with its great intellectual projects that were announces only retrospectively.

It’s part of the film’s magic – let us embrace this word if only for once – that it turns a small town in the provincial South into a dynamic laboratory, populated with a priori sampling populations that were destined to be thrown away in the garbage can of history: the small wisdom of commoners, the kind cynicism that allows one to survive living under a dictatorship, the various comedic outlets that render the elephant in the room irrelevant, between “(mass murderer) Rîmaru Returns” and “Don’t you want to take a look at my collection of records?”. With an attention that is worthy of chroniclers and a knowledge of gags still unparalleled in Romanian cinema, Caranfil understood that he could pour an amount of creative phantasy in this film that his characters were undeserving of, since their highest ideal was not that of a better tomorrow – a basic notion both in the atrophied age of communism, and in the no-holds-barred capitalism that followed –, but of a relaxed, inconspicuous survival until said tomorrow. And if we can also fluff it up with some bodily pleasures along the way, it’s all the better.

One needs a filmmaker’s eye to dig through this life devoid of existential questions (a blase actor, a naive schoolgirl, a disoriented soldier) and to understand that, in its lack of grandeur, it still meant something. The two great poles of the immediately post-communist Romanian cinema, Pintilie and Caranfil, the only ones whose oeuvre from the nineties still holds strong, proves the same appetence towards allegory – one turning communist-era Romania into an open-air madhouse, and the other, into a summer camp attended by the entire nation. For both, this period in time is like a sort of pause within history, a time without time that ends up by suffering from dementia or, in certain cases, from a monstrous form of innocence. And somewhere in the middle of it all – and with all due respect to Pintilie, who, at the time, is probably the most underrated Romanian filmmaker -, Caranfil enjoys a sort of momentary advantage: it’s not negligible that, in the midst of a movement that was glorifying universal topics, one chose to tell the measly tale of an anonymous anti-hero. Amongst so many hot-headed directors, Caranfil worked far away from any barricades, extracting himself from the ambiental manicheism of the era in order to deliver an outdated (and, to a certain extent, premonitory) view upon a past that was still very much present.

This delay should be constantly underlined. As if he were to despise any loud noises, Caranfil invented something else altogether – to the same degree to which he sometimes incorporated echoes of said noise (and here lies the gamut of his art), which he sublimates into a sort of underground music. È pericoloso sporgersi is scored to the sound of sexism, of stupid jokes, of pointless emphasis (Nathalie Bonnifay, in the role of a histrionic highschool girl, is delightfully kitsch) – all sorts of tricks that one can hang onto, which have meanwhile been replaced or rendered useless, which turn the film into a truly touching aesthetical object, constructed from a matter that is revolute and despised. But still an object that can stand up on its own, supported by a certain type of preoccupation towards mise-en-scene – an attraction for entrances and exits from the frame, for coincidences and points of view – which takes part in the contradictory destiny of the film. È pericoloso sporgersi increasingly transforms itself, as the fiction cools down, into its own documentary. It’s a form of modesty – that in the middle of collective delirium, one was still able to look towards the north of cinema – and within this modesty, a pleasure born of rigor and constraint, has also probably been forgotten.

„È pericoloso sporgersi” will be re-released in Romanian cinemas on the 19th of May.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.