I must confess right away that one of the debut films I’ve most eagerly looked forward to in recent years is that of filmmaker Sarra Tsorakidis. Her short films captivated me with the way they captured snapshots from the lives of protagonists who are vaguely socially alienated yet forced by various circumstances to spend time around (too) many people. Her camera often focused on liminal images, with a very tight focal distance, shrouding things in a kind of haze that acted as a symbolic parallel to the fog and blur her characters felt – implacable and inaccessible until the inevitable, fateful moment when all the clouds around them would unleash an emotional storm. I was all the more thrilled when I found out that Ink Wash, her long-awaited debut film, was included in this year’s selection of the Toronto Film Festival – where we rarely see world premieres of Romanian films, making its selection all the more notable.

The first half-hour of the film is more or less an extended (though much less formally adventurous) remake of the short film that established Tsorakidis as one of the most exciting young voices in Romanian cinema: Ivy (2018), but reversing the central premise. This time, it’s not the character played by Ilinca Hărnuț (i.e. Zoe in the short film, Lena in the feature) who introduces a new partner into her fragile circle of friends, which hides many deep interpersonal wounds – but her ex, who presents a new, much younger, slightly woke-annoying and slightly… pregnant girlfriend to the group, much to everyone’s surprise. (Of course, Lena, whom we learn is a painter, reacts by getting drunk and hooking up with someone else from the group right in front of everyone.)

There is something interesting about this kind-of-obnoxious new girlfriend played by Ana Dumitrașcu: being a Gen Z in a group of Gen X-ers, she is navigating unfamiliar, vaguely hostile territory, and can seem both abrasive and naive, jumpy, (too) easily offended. Dumitrașcu’s performance turns her character into the only genuinely honest (to a fault – she seems to believe in some New Age nonsense) and straightforward presence in an otherwise suffocating environment, shrouded in the thick smoke of the Nirvana generation’s ubiquitous humour, where everything is a quip, an inside joke, or a sarcastic retort, with cryptic undertones hidden behind an arrogant sense of superiority. It’s a universe populated by people who don’t even tell half-truths (maybe quarter-truths), whose embarrassed or complacent smiles only know how to disguise themselves as sardonic grins, masking their inability to relate honestly and transparently. (There’s something here that slightly echoes Marius Olteanu’s Monsters.)

Ink Wash is a puzzle, a mature drama that rejects from the outset the histrionic hysterics we usually see in Romanian films – and replaces them with an accurate time of our society.

Lena’s difficulty in achieving this kind of communication – which she clearly desires but remains stuck in her old patterns of attraction and interaction – also marks the second half of the film, which is where Tsorakidis’ debut truly blossoms. Once it shakes off the shadow of Ivy (like a final look back), Ink Wash reveals itself as a highly mature and rhetorically complex endeavour: pulled from the murky waters of Bucharest by a temp job that takes her to Băile Herculane, where she has to complete a mural, Lena finds herself thrown into the brave new world of post-pandemic Romanian economic realities, and her personal dilemmas (navigating a breakup and loneliness, the idea of going abroad for work) take on a whole new weight.

Rather than closing off the small-town setting (as is often the case in Romanian cinema), here it opens up wide: the wall Lena is painting is in a hotel undergoing renovation after being bought by a group of foreign businessmen, led by Danish “daddy” Asgard – the attraction between him and the protagonist is obvious from the first moment. They’re the kind of people who dabble in everything and nothing at the same time – in a seemingly benevolent gesture, they urge the artist to take on Roni (the remarkable Radouan Leflahi, a delight to see him again after his standout performance in Poppy Field), a young refugee aided by their foundation, as her assistant. What began as a drama remarkably and unexpectedly becomes a cold analysis of Romania’s new economic and labour realities, as the country transitions to the status of a developed economy, a destination for labour migration, and a breeding ground for international capital. Lena, a representative of the privileged bourgeois-bohemian group, facing a parallel reality in the labour market, becomes a great vehicle for exploring the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie and their blindness towards the local working class, what is left of it (it’s no coincidence that the workers on the hotel construction site are always filmed from a great distance, symbolically the same perspective from which the protagonist views them). It’s a critique of the middle class and social stratification not seen before in Romanian cinema, except for Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World and, if we claim it as a Romanian film, Toni Erdmann. The fact that the film also addresses the still-rarely touched subject of refugees arriving in our country is commendable.

Of course, Tsorakidis doesn’t avoid all the pitfalls of a format (or genre?) I call “drama with a solitary and sad woman in rooms”, already well-established in European art cinema (to name just a few titles: Moon, 66 Questions by Jacqueline Lentzou, or Anatomy by Ola Jankowska). But she manages to inject it with a vital freshness: using concentrated yet well-paced doses of macro-political and economic perspectives, rather than the self-indulgent individualism we usually see under the surface of these types of narratives.

Lena’s drift seems largely the same as that of her country, caught between two not so much opposing or antagonistic as conflicting directions: blinded by her eternal aspiration to the West, a pink pill swallowed without reading the leaflet beforehand (and the side effects are far from negligible); but also a deep nostalgia for something “intrinsically Romanian” that remains impossible to escape, ineffable, but whose slow disappearance is evident. A nostalgia that we sense in these incredibly tender shots where Tsorakidis films some elderly women at the spa, making fun of their dead abusive husbands (in their words: “a scum who made your life hell”). “Oh let me live!” says one of them, laughing with that deep-seated “if it’s not funny, it’s tragic” attitude embedded in local culture, while Lena watches wistfully. But what exactly does she want – is it the same ease and lightness, the same desire to be alone and live free from a man’s shadow, or something we can’t even intuit beneath her implacable surface?

Ink Wash is a puzzle, a mature drama that rejects from the outset the histrionic hysterics we usually see in Romanian films – and replaces them with an accurate time of our society.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.