What can an image do against the passage of time? The old question posed by pioneers becomes increasingly relevant. Merman, an audiovisual collage confidently directed by Ana Lungu, dares to offer us multiple answers, starting from the archives of some ordinary people. The film has its world premiere in the International Competition at the FIDMarseille Festival (June 25-30, 2024).

Merman is a film of multiple disparities: between our current reality, from which we watch sheltered by the screen, and the past of raw images; between the concrete biography of its characters and the soul supplement that objective data (and external images) cannot contain; finally, between the photographic presence of these people and the feeling that they remain opaque and inaccessible to us until the end – they’re here, right in front of us, almost real, and yet lost forever. Ana Lungu works with these paradoxes. The film’s ultimate horizon is the ontological melancholy caused by the image, which simultaneously attests that someone, somewhere, has lived, and that death has never ceased. A cultivated spirit, attentive to the tectonics and inherent faults of the visual, to its omissions and betrayals, while exploiting all the possibilities offered by this time capsule, the filmmaker delivers with Merman one of the most important Romanian montage films.

Tritone (i.e. the original title of the film is Triton): a musical interval composed of three whole tones. But also – an extension operated by a playful intelligence – the code name of the informant Alexandru Popovici, a composer and music teacher by profession. But the title’s polysemy conceals a deceptive promise. The protagonist’s activity with the Securitate turns into a wild goose chase: tens of thousands of pages read by the film’s narrator only to discover a single piece of information of little strategic importance. It’s not the only dead end: the whole film seems to be built as a rhizomic investigation, a tangle of trajectories that either lead nowhere or lead to completely unannounced destinations. The more I think about it, the film seems like a playful exercise in detective work, a delve into a tightly sealed past, where immediate stakes are extinguished and archaeological pleasure is infinite. Ana Lungu builds a composite portrait, gathering everything that comes her way – from CNSAS files (i.e. National Council for Studying the Securitate Archives) to boxes full of personal photos – to give us the intimate truth of a man like so many others.

If it fails, it does so only after an absurd battle. Absurd because it is both salutary and slippery: taken out of anonymity, thrown into the eternal present of the screen, this man is at the same time exposed. He finds himself surrounded by the filmmaker’s interest, an interest that subtly slides into mania, until, at one point – when she realises she knows more about these interconnected lives than they knew themselves – the narrator says, “Stop!” But only after methodically inventorying Popovici’s loves and career, his travels and passions: in short, a descent into the depths of this biography, all the more vertiginous as, ultimately, it proves illusory: we may, by the end, know Popovici’s journeys – from GDR to Tulcea – but we know just as little about what truly animates him as we did at the beginning. As the film’s minutes pass, this image of the man becomes both clearer and more desperate in its clarity: however much more “evidence” is brought forth, our access into Popovici’s life will never be anything other than obstructed, incomplete, and voyeuristic. The archive is an invitation to the surface of existences that do not belong to us.

Is that a problem? Not really – rather, it’s the victory of the flesh-and-blood being over all devices that claim to discern and fix it on a medium. It’s revenge against the algorithm, the power to keep our secret even after death, defying documents, images, trackers, and watchers. Still, the image is not completely powerless – if it doesn’t deliver the whole person, it at least delivers a version of them. The most striking moments, featured under the title “Cocorăscu Studios”, show the photos captured by Popovici of various women who walked through his door. All of a sudden, this small pawn of socialism, this ordinary guy with thinning hair and a protruding belly, becomes someone else. Everything we knew about him must be reevaluated in light of these new pieces of evidence; the images – as in the best found footage films – end up criticising each other.

The film then becomes charged with a genuine erotic thrill, an almost perverse surge that brings us disturbingly close to some female bodies, captured in the clandestinity of a communist room. By juxtaposing nudes and flowers photographed by Popovici, in the order they were discovered in the same box titled “Beauties, beauties, all kinds of beauties”, the film creates an island of fetishism: the sovereign gaze of this man then guides us to what must be the heart of his world. Not necessarily subversive in a socio-political sense, the gesture of these photographs points to a shadowy and unspoken area, a part of Popovici’s personality that leaps beyond convention. The narrator’s voice admits, then, that the act of producing images says as much about the person behind the camera as about what is in front of it – and it’s to the credit of this protean film that it doesn’t jump to hasty-moralising conclusions but leave us in the company of the distinct pieces that make up this man. It’s our job to piece them together if we can.

The segment dedicated to Popovici takes up most of the film. It is flanked – a tri-tonic symmetry – by the montage of some homemade videos shot by the director’s uncle towards the end of communism and another (called “prologue”, but included at the end) featuring footage from World War II, while, off-screen, a woman “writes” to her husband who is away at war. Two superb additions – especially the first, a fantastic juxtaposition of objects, beings, motifs, each image seemingly convulsively, stickily born from the previous one – even if risky, as they threaten to shake the film’s unity. But, as the film’s bold mise-en-scène gamble, they must be taken as such, especially since they allow the filmmaker to explore the heavy decades of communism, taking us, in reverse-chronological order, from the dawn of the nineties to the sad memory of the Soviet front.

Merman thus takes on a different scope, a truly epochal one, describing through small gestures, conjugal desires, and degrees of kinship, a less triumphalist but equally heartbreaking destiny of lives caught in history. From the father’s eyes filming his family to Popovici’s capturing the intimate – and less intimate – parts of his acquaintances and to the drama of the woman who pours out her passion in a letter, Merman unravels and recreates through montage (and a touch of fiction) the saga of three people who, living under different times, have left traces in the world.

Victor Morozov

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