Corneliu Porumboiu is a special guest at this year’s Visions du Réel, the renowned documentary film festival held in Switzerland. A strange choice only at first glance, given how fluidly the director once moved between seemingly antagonistic cinematic forms.

It’s been nearly ten years since the release of The Treasure (2015) – a title that has always seemed to enjoy an ambiguous reputation in Porumboiu’s career. Flanked by two reflective documentaries made on the spur of the moment – The Second Game (2014) and Infinite Football (2018) – the film belongs to a period when the filmmaker indulged in minimalist-experimental gestures, cultivating organic transitions between conventional fictions and documentary pieces that hovered at the edge of cinematic devices, able to function equally well in a movie theater or an art gallery. I see this as a positive development, one that aligns with the historical trajectory of moving-image art, less and less bound to a specific place or institution. But at the time, many commentators criticized Porumboiu for this formal rarefaction, which they claimed undermined the very foundation of his works, reducing them – according to a stern reading – to mere personal whims.

Porumboiu himself seems to have taken note, releasing in 2019 what remains his most recent film, The Whistlers (La Gomera), a project born out of a paradigm that is the exact opposite: one of conforming to genre conventions, indulging the audience, and showcasing a generous budget. That effort wasn’t without its virtues – not least the surprise of finally giving detractors of the Romanian New Wave exactly what they’d always demanded: action, music, sex appeal – but to me, it felt more like a step back compared to the frustrating, probing experiments through which Porumboiu had been testing the very medium of cinema. The Second Game might not be a “full” film – in fact, it seems that the director’s intentions are more thrilling than what ends up onscreen – but within the broader context of Romanian cinema, which remains skittish to this day whenever it dares to look beyond story, character, theme, and other Romanian Film Center-friendly criteria, it simply blasted. The disdain for cinema as populist entertainment, the refusal to be easily legible through simplification – these were rare qualities, preaching a form of creative freedom. In his restrained review of the film, Andrei Gorzo rightly discussed that football match, commented on by Porumboiu and his father (a former referee), in terms of a cinematic readymade volleyed straight into the editing bay. Even if the shot missed the goal, the execution was beautiful.

In the end, for a successful Romanian filmmaker to indulge in forms so exotic that they require, for their description, a vocabulary more appropriate to the field of art than to film analysis, is surely more notable than that same filmmaker raising the stakes through ever more expensive and cumbersome projects. The risk of this game – of radically purging the film apparatus – becomes all too real when we’re dealing with a matured vision, one that might lose everything to “frivolity.” Only with Radu Jude do we see – this time systematized – the same impulse to thrash respectability in cinema. In fact, Porumboiu’s football films can be seen as forerunners even if only for the analogies they opened up between sport and mise-en-scène. Porumboiu may be the first to explicitly frame this transformation of cinema into a way of thinking about the world, extending its relevance far beyond the movie theater. He launched into a deconstruction of his own cinematic device until all that remained was an unrecognizable skeleton: a football match from the Communist era discussed apathetically – the ground zero of cinema. From there, the only way forward was to retrace his own steps until he felt ready to build again.

Porumboiu is an intuitive rather than a theoretical filmmaker, and he excelled when he scattered signs of larger conversations through his films. His best effort, which also happens to be his debut feature, 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), immediately melted a debate about memory, ritual, and the instrumentalization of past events into a playful form that brought face-to-face the outdated aura of cinema and the pitiful blunders of television. The Treasure is also symptomatic because it concludes this somewhat stiff process of listening to his own directorial body (his previous fiction film, When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2010), even included footage of the protagonist’s internal organs), which had ended in a formalist void. Compared to the long, rigid scenes of that film, The Treasure shows a softening toward possible forms of fantasy: it opens with drawings from a storybook, placing the entire universe on the coordinates of a fantastic plot. Porumboiu doesn’t develop the allusion: he trusts the viewer’s attention, hoping that this “frame,” coupled with the larger narrative – a treasure hunt, made all the more fantastical by Porumboiu’s efforts to make it seem fully plausible – will be enough to stir the imagination: we are on the ruins of a genre film; it’s enough to project, on the screen of the mind, as if in a live superimposition, scenes from classic Hollywood with treasure hunters for the film to animate with all the glittering charge of cinema-as-epiphany.

It’s an interesting idea, but I confess I wish it had been tested more explicitly in the film. The Treasure is rather dour, a feat that only familiarity with Porumboiu’s cinephile tricks can rescue from the anonymity of the Romanian New Wave. Coming after Metabolism, the director’s renewed willingness to make fiction seems all the more surprising, even if it runs at minimum power. It lights up occasionally – like when it lingers on the screeching sounds of the metal detector, clashing with the atmosphere of a sleepy mountain village. For Porumboiu, such sounds, along with the technical images of the graphs traced by the specialized equipment, place the cinematic medium in tension with an exterior, intrusive presence – they are pure potential. Theoretically, the film could veer in an entirely different direction, becoming a full-blown Western. If it doesn’t, it’s because it still relies on a kind of attention to the infinitesimal that the increasingly static poses of the Romanian New Wave – transformed by filmmakers like Muntean or Rădulescu into studies of minutiae and stillness – have turned into a reflex of perception. But seen from today’s perspective, The Treasure is a film that doesn’t fully embrace the temptation. And even if it had – as would happen with The Whistlers – the resulting hall of mirrors (a reference that leads to a reference that leads to…) would probably have been just as dissatisfying. An aporia.

We live in louder, more politicized times, where such subtleties – how much leeway can a filmmaker afford without endangering their realist structure, etc. – are cast into irrelevance. Ten years feel like a chasm. Between the pretentious clench of Metabolism and the gratuitous delirium of The Whistlers, The Treasure offers a middle path that tries to keep its distance from both forms of despair: the fear that you can’t take a single step without justifying yourself, and the fear that no matter how many steps you take, you’re still standing still. Drawing from both painstaking confession and relativist gimmick just enough to make it barely recognizable, The Treasure contains at its core a rupture: it’s the transitional film in which Porumboiu’s opposing creative pursuits coexisted for the space of a single scene – depicting the reconciliatory, wholesome joy of a child discovering a treasure, even if not genuine.

Victor Morozov

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