Heads and Tails, the latest film by Nicolae Constantin Tănase, is unequal in its development and inconstant as a viewing experience. At most, it can be considered surprising; but in all fairness, we can assume that the filmmakers have decided halfway to sweeten things up, to ease up on the viewers and give back something positive after putting them through such a harsh trial. On the other hand, its premise – turning a terrible news item into an occasion for social self-examination, by pouring it into a particularly extreme cinematic experience – is quite rare among the Romanian feature films as to deserve a thorough discussion. The real event is situated on a moral axis somewhere between social tragedy and dumb misfortune: A young man has put his favorite “manea” song on repeat in a club, not once, but ten times until someone as drunk smashed a bottle on his head. In the ambulance, he signed a waiver refusing medical services and stayed home unattended (almost) until his death. Much of the film uses the long takes that have long been the norm in Romanian cinema, so as to follow, about as dryly as suggested by the above synopsis, the physical degradation of the boy. Alex Călin does a lot of medical acting in the leading role, with his head bandaged or with a trembling voice, as he passes through agony, and the objective style of shooting and the precision of his interpretation are occasionally interrupted by Impressionist touches (the turtle in his aquarium, the only non-audiovisual thing that moves in his vicinity, at some point attains monstrous proportions within the frame). Taking the story out of the Pro-TV breaking news model (His favourite “manea” got him killed!), Tănase and co-screenwriter Raluca Mănescu invite us (or constrain us) to the humane gesture of empathizing with the protagonist, by willingly discarding the entertaining part of the situation and by making any kind of miracle rescue unlikely from the very beginning.

The combination of news item with macro-social analysis is a frequent practice in realist cinema, and among Romanian films it has at least one thoroughly discussed precedent in Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills: the case of exorcism in the Tanacu monastery becomes a synecdoche for the way all Romanian institutions work (the orphan home, hospital, church, etc.). In Heads and Tails, how much and what exactly is to be interpreted from this real story remains at the viewers’ own consideration, although some elements are definitely present in the keywords: Would there be a fight if someone listened 10 times to a pop song or any more reputable type of music, instead of a “manea”? Would the ambulance crew have let the patient sign the waiver and go home, fully aware of the fact he was drunk, if they had picked him up him in other circumstances and not in front of a club in the middle of the night? There are hints in the film, discreet as they may be, that his great need of medical care was overlooked because of the boy’s marginal status – in the fiction film, he lives his last days in a modest studio and is interpreted by a darker-skin actor than the real protagonist of the news – and, consequently, the enhanced attention given by the film, by following him day after day while his health is worsening, is a means to compensate for this social indifference.

Even accepting this premise, the filmmakers define their character in an often heavy-handed way, in a logic about which Tanase says it belongs to the story and not taken from the real story. Since the “fatal” manea is about solidarity among brothers, the protagonist is shown hanging throughout the film by a brother who is absent: he refuses the passes made by his brother’s girlfriend (Iulia Ciochina), he dedicates the song to his brother on the fateful night, he calls him when he feels he’s losing control. Even the flashy incidental details we notice about the character (the phone, the clothes) lead rather to a caricature than to an individualization, considering that we get to see such a small part of his life.

The most successful scene in the film is the one happening in the club, which makes use of the cinematographic features to the maximum: on the dance floor (filmed in a wide shot with rare editing cuts), fewer and fewer erratic individuals are moving around; there is no dialogue, the protagonist is often closer to the DJ than the camera, and the soundtrack is an obsessive repetition of the Heads and Tails song by Florin Salam. This repetition is accentuated by trimming down the song to the chorus at its last iterations, which we newly hear again and again. Two individuals (who get close to the camera in a key moment, with the protagonist directly in the line of their gaze) seem to plan something about the young man who keeps asking the “manea” to be played, but when he’s hit with the bottle, the event is not anticipated by the film’s directing choices.

Such dramaturgy – with no dialogue, with plenty of diegetic music, emphasizing the movement across a space of some silhouettes – can be used both in arthouse narrative (by filmmakers who rely on the observational skill of the camera) and in comedy – a recent Romanian example lies in the short film A Night in Tokoriki (dir. Roxana Stroe, 2016). Though the things it has in common with Heads and Tails are rather arbitrary (a love triangle, family ties, the presence of Iulia Ciochina, a drunken hit to the head with a bottle), at least the dance sequences can be watched together in order to compare two styles of effective film directing. Tokoriki follows an intruder who dances way too close to a couple, cutting in close shots the power dynamic (which remains opaque) between him and her and him. Heads and Tails leaves enough room for the suspense to accumulate, and even gives the viewer time to become irritated by the repetition of the song. Both films speculate the intimate and general character of the semi-drunken midnight dancing, and through this they make us empathize with characters – no matter the distance between filmmakers, viewers and characters, regardless of their status or the typology they play or how largely it is written on their forehead, we watch them closely as they dance along, hoping that everything turns out OK.

Irina Trocan

She teaches at the Bucharest Film School & when not teaching, she writes criticism, and when not writing, she edits reviews and essays for Acoperișul de Sticlă (and beyond). When doing neither of these, she arbitrarily watches bad YouTube or, even better, wastes her time.