Blue Moon is the feature-film debut of actress and scriptwriter Alina Grigore, known for her roles in Best Intentions (2011) and Illegitimate (2016), the latter of which she also wrote together with director Adrian Sitaru. In Blue Moon, the pièce de résistance is the performance of protagonist Irina (Ioana Chițu), a young woman who wants to pursue studies in Bucharest, but cannot overcome the resistance of her family. To summarize the film thusly doesn’t do it any justice, because Grigore carefully and mysteriously arranges several narrative pathways that intersect with Irina’s. 

Alina Grigore works with complexity. She is interested in memories, the past and the ways in which they reflect into the present. Because the film analyzes Irina’s relationship to her cousin (Mircea Postelnicu), the discussion oftentimes turns to moments in their childhood – for example, to the time when Liviu saved Irina from drowning. Such rememberings lay the brickwork of their co-dependent relationship, and offer nuance to Liviu’s violent attitude towards Irina. The filmmaker is courageous in her choice of adding the dimension of Irina’s liaison with an actor from the capital (Emil Măndănac) into this mix, as he often asks her why she is scared of the aggressive nature of her sexual impulses. This terrain is Freudian, but it never becomes too insistent, too exaggerated in its pursuits, because the filmmaker is primarily interested in the performance of Chițu within these topics, as he is playing a cloistered, worried, light-headed character. Irina thus becomes a fascinating character, because Chițu retains a rebellious and defensive attitude throughout, and the film’s drama manages to subside in her character – the markings of a successful fiction film. 

Irina’s relationship to the other female characters is also important, but it’s constructed in a more fragile fashion. In one of the film’s most virtuous displays of camerawork, Irina’s gaze follows the car in which her sister (Ioana Ilinca Neacșu) manages to escape their boardroom hotel, while the camera directs its gaze to the building’s second floor, where two members of her family (performed by Vlad Ivanov and Mădălina Stoica) are talking about the moon – a conversation which also inspires the film’s title. This sequence, in which Stoica’s character is seemingly hallucinating, emphasizes the alienation felt by these characters who are trapped within the borders of the hotel they’re running, subjugated by the male forces that are running both the family business and their lives, as a whole. 

A remarkable debut, Blue Moon regards the difficult ways in which young women living in the profoundly patriarchal rural areas can take matters into their own hands. This drama is incisive not only due to its topic matter (which the filmmaker aptly spins into an entire narrative framework), but also through the tempestuous ways in which Irina responds to the challenges which she is facing.

This review has been published in our first print issue no.1 /2021, which can be still bought on our website, until the end of this March. 

Diana Smeu

Collaborates with FILM Menu and Acoperișul de Sticlă. She would love to live in a Bollywood romantic film.