Last year’s celebration of the Romanian Centennial offered a context for Romanian cineastes to explore various ideas: such as questioning the meaning of national identity, a reevaluation of the past, various x-rays of the nation reflecting in a variety of films, with examples as diverse as The Free Dacians (Monica Lăzurean Gorgan & Andrei Gorgan, 2018), I do not care if we go down in history as Barbarians (Radu Jude, 2018) or Being Romanian: a Family Journal / Jurnalul familiei –escu (Șerban Georgescu, 2018). Amongst all of these titles, Georgescu’s film is by far the most conventional of the bunch, both formally and ideologically – but, it is also the one that has the most direct approach of all, when it comes to its attempt at penetrating the national construct, opting for an uphill path on its journey to devolve our country’s complicated history.

There are certain inherent risks when it comes to this kind of endeavors, that don’t beat too much around the bush; Georgescu’s film – which is composed out of an investigative process into his family’s genealogy, coupled with a series of interviews with certain Romanian intellectuals – does little to avoid them. It’s enough to take a look at the multifaceted, yet by and large homogenous image of the country that rests behind the film: one that is composed of essentialisms, banalities, and spiritual anecdotes. Some samples of wisdom: at one point, Theodor Paleologu – the film’s undisputed champion in terms of antiquated platitudes – states that „there is a certain kind of Moldovan oafishness”; later on, he emits another irrevocable sentence: „soccer is a team sport, so, by definition, it is impossible for Romanians to be good at it”. The topic of sports isn’t exonerated in the speech of Sorin Ioniță either, whom – in one of his innumerable aberrant, scornful observations within the film – uses it to pierce the flesh of the national psyche: „We’re a part of those nations which experience the glory of sports by mandating it. We’d much rather sit on our couches sipping beer and cracking seeds and let the boys on the field give us our sense of glory”, concludes Ioniță, expertly.

I won’t linger on this – but the substandard level of these statements, in which much of what is said is simple deadweight, is one of the documentary’s many deficiencies: on the one hand, the film gives a platform to voices which are already commonplace in the mainstream media discourse, such as Vintilă Mihăilescu, Ioana Pârvulescu, Stelian Tănase, Mihaela Miroiu, Ioniță, Paleologu. Of course, a director shouldn’t be forced to go around searching for innovative approaches or challenges – but a tiny bit of audacity, coupled with an (obligatory, I’d say) appeal to an alternative, oppositional voice that would reject all these commonly agreed upon ideas (regarding communism, the transitional era, etc.) which the film very self-indulgently babbles on about as if they were some kind of self-evident truths, would have been welcome.

On the other hand, oftentimes the answers that Georgescu gets in his investigative process are outright inadequate: Ioana Pârvulescu quotes the likes of Schopenhauer to determine what it means to live in a high-rise apartment for Romanians; Paleologu makes a distinction between the Cosa nostra and res publica as a means of indexing the endemic egoism that plagues the common Romanian, who’s been dumbed down by collectivization; Vintilă Mihăilescu is compelled to repeat – in front of Georgescu’s lazy camera – the idea that cabbage rolls / sarmale are a type of food that is claimed as a national item of cuisine all across the Balkans, which is an idea he had already exposed some 20 years ago in an article he had co-written with Radu Anton Roman. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the film much too often limits itself at being self-explanatory: such as the moment in which, boundlessly naive, Georgescu is exposing his happiness – while in front of a shopping cart that is full to the brim – at the thought that foodstuffs are now universally available at the buyer’s discretion, in a varied offer, without even as much as a shadow of doubt at the ideas of globalization, consumerism, of the dictatorship of banality… to ever cross his mind.

I must confess that I have some problems when it comes to clearly distinguishing the amount of irony in this film – like, for example, in parts such as the one I’ve previously mentioned, or the scene in which Georgescu seems to make (very risky) jokes about the „masculine authority” within a marriage. The director’s voice, which firmly and completely unimaginatively guides the film from the voice-over, simply cancels any chance at a break in rhythm, any sort of surprise. But the film is interesting in spite – or, rather, in virtue – of these blunders: Georgescu sketches an identikit of Romanians that have already been inscribed in the mental collective for a long time – just to refute it in the end. In an analysis that is benevolent towards the film, Ionuț Mareș states that Georgescu’s feature „isn’t a textbook lesson and cliches as used towards their own deconstruction”.

In my opinion, its success is at most partial, however, there are more than enough ideas that deserve to be retained: such as Mihaela Miroiu’s subtly feminist view in her interventions, which destabilize the otherwise dull rhetoric about communist evils, shifting it towards a more uncommon path – what was the gendered experience of the communist regime? Or, perhaps, the laid-back way in which Mihăilescu introduces ethnographic elements in his discourse, sometimes acting as a graceful discursive partner to Miroiu’s anecdotes about how femininity would be performed in society: Miroiu discusses the lack of vision of those who, back in the days, would decide what types of feminine clothing would be available in stores; consequently, Mihăilescu describes the aplomb of homemade tailory, which was suited to one’s tastes and far from the eyes of the establishment. Some hints indicate the fact that this could have been one of those state-of-the-nation films which reveal the unseen side of things, which creates a type of discourse that is adequate, lucid, without any sort of complacency. In moments like these, in which the film manages to find appropriate responses, which match the scale of its anthropological ambitions, Being Romanian: a Family Journal is sowing the seeds for a future such project – one that remains to be done.

Victor Morozov

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