Back then, film premieres were on Mondays.

I don’t remember how old I was (maybe 7, maybe 8, who knows?), but I do remember seeing it twice in the first week. I think it was at the Scala Cinema – “Two tickets, are they assigned seats?!” Then I went to see it again whenever I could – sometimes with my mom (who found it funny but thought it didn’t compare to Plein soleil / Purple Noon (1960), for example – I would come to agree with her later), sometimes with my dad (who grimaced and considered it a minor thriller – I would come to agree with him later), and sometimes with my good friend Cătălin R. (who was older than me but had accepted my indecent proposal to check off ALL the movie theatres in Bucharest during a long, hot summer – thus, I ended up memorising certain movies). Cătălin thought we were overdoing it and that my ambition might turn into a pathological obsession – I would come to agree with him later.

Don’t think that the summer break changed anything – I saw the film again when I went to the mountains (both at the Club Cinema in Cumpătu and the two-screen cinema in Sinaia) and then the seaside (at the Club Bazin in Neptun). Here, I know for sure that I saw it twice in the same day – I came out after the 3 p.m. screening, spent a few good minutes looking at the “Româniafilm presents” poster, then went back in and bought a ticket for the 5 p.m. screening. Mom thought it was heatstroke, dad, too much Pepsi. I would come to agree with them later.

I saw it a few more times in Bucharest, on the “boulevard” – back then, movies were periodically re-released, shorter, more faded, and more worn out, because why not? Then – hiatus. Quite a few years. I started to believe I would never see it again. I started to believe I’d never see anything other than charmless Romanian films or dull Korean titles. CUT TO: Paris, June 1990, more precisely Montrouge. Evening, quiet, I was channel-surfing alone – M6, maybe France2, possibly Canal+, who knows? The shock wasn’t that I caught it halfway through the opening credits, but when I realised it was the first time I’d watched it in an uncut version – chunks (I exaggerate a bit – slices, rather) of violence and nudity had been butchered out of the copies distributed on the screens of socialist Romania, along with bits of dialogue that were actually important to the plot. The assassination attempt in the office now made sense and had a certain elegance, long story short.

In the summer of ’90, I also spent a week at my aunt’s vacation home, located in a village called Petits Marteaux (Little Hammers, literally). Riding the bike, peace and quiet, (a lot of) cheese – that was pretty much it, the life of Riley. Petits Marteaux was about 10 minutes away from the Douchy-Montcorbon estate. One Sunday, we decided to go there and peek through the fence, hoping to see something. We didn’t see anything, but it was as if we had.

I managed to record the film (on a videotape) only towards the late ’90s – the version aired on TV had the same subtitles as the copy screened in cinemas, which pretty much meant that it came from the archives. And it was the censored version, of course. In the mid-2000s, I finally found the Pathé-edited DVD in a small, cramped yet paradoxically bright boutique in Cannes. Today it no longer exists. The boutique, not Cannes. I was in Rennes, in 2017 (finishing post-production on Charleston), when it was finally released on Blu-Ray – the morning I bought it, I was in front of the shop before opening hours. I gave the old DVD to another good friend – he didn’t seem too thrilled, but at least now he doesn’t make fun of me for rewatching the movie (and what a movie it is!) every year like a true maniac.

I switched to using the original title* quite late – for years, I only referred to it by its Romanian title, as generic and silly as it is. My aunt from Paris didn’t even understand what movie I was talking about – pretty ironic, considering she lived and died in the country where High Noon was called Le train sifflera trois fois (!). That’s just one example out of a thousand, but I don’t want to go on too long. I have a date with an old friend – the oldest. It’s true he’s aged, he repeats himself, stutters – he’s frail and tired, and his joints ache, despite the 2K upgrade. But it’s still him, from any angle I look at it. Indeed, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

*Pour la peau d’un flic / For a Cop’s Hide, 1981. Produced, directed, and starring Alain Delon.

Andrei Crețulescu

Regizor. Cel mai recent film al său, Ext. Mașină. Noapte,va fi lansat în cinematografe în septembrie.