Two Romanian films had their world premieres at this year’s edition of the Berlinale, in the prestigious Forum side-bar, dedicated to experimental-minded cinema – a debut fiction feature, Mammalia, as well as a sophomore documentary, Between Revolutions, by Vlad Petri. 

The Berlinale has consistently been one of the major pillars for Romanian cinema’s international popularity, together with the Cannes Film Festival – and of the three big European festivals, it’s the one from which local filmmakers have brought home the most trophies (multiple Silver Bears, and Golden Bears for Child’s Pose, 2013, Touch Me Not, 2018 and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, 2021). 

This year, the Berlinale’s selection contains two Romanian feature films, both presented in the Forum section, which is dedicated to formally and aesthetically non-conventional proposals. This year is unlikely to bring any new Bears to Romania’s roster, as the Forum is non-competitive, but that doesn’t take away from the prestigious nature of this selection.

After all, Romanian cinema hasn’t made its way into this section, which gives the exact time in experimental-minded cinema, all that often: in the last ten years, only four Romanian filmmakers – Corneliu Porumboiu, Adrian Sitaru, Marius Olteanu and Radu Jude, the latter with a double selection in 2020 – have premiered their films here. And the appearance of two emerging filmmakers in the Forum, both present for the first time at the Berlinale, is a very good sign, especially because it underlines the increasingly diverse nature of recent Romanian cinema: Mammalia, by Sebastian Mihăilescu, and Between Revoltions, by Vlad Petri.

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Mammalia: sterile beauty

On paper, Mammalia is a debut film (in fiction; in practice, it’s a sophomore film, following his feature-length documentary You Are Ceaușescu To Me, 2021) – and it’s one that has been long expected, especially due to Mihăilescu’s success with his remarkable 2016 short film,  Apartament interbelic, zonă superbă, ultracentrală.

In the center of the film, we have Camil (István Téglás), or rather, the crisis in his relationship with Andreea (Mălina Manovici), his partner. If, so far, this sounds like a typical Romanian New Wave premise, well, things are just about to go crazy: Andreea disappears after joining what seems to be a cult – with hippie, new-age vibes –, and Camil (who is seemingly suffering from some sort of penile problems) sets off to find her.

In short: it’s a seeming midnight movie about the crisis of capital-M masculinity – or, in Mihăilescu’s words, „the film satirizes the way that classic binary gender roles are often rigidly defined in society, and it highlights the performative nature of gender identity”. And in case this was not sufficiently clear to audiences, the filmmaker’s nice enough to help you out with a close-up, shot in a long single take, of Camil’s penis (which, of course, indicates that he’s having issues with his virility/sterility), only to then put him into a closet (eternal metaphor of repressed queerness) inside a large jacket placed on a clothes hanger.

It’s not just rules of the New Wave that Mihăilescu pokes fun at here – he also takes a swing at the tropes cottagecore horror flicks (think Midsommar or The Witch): his preference for long single takes creates an atmosphere that is much rather tense than sinister, and Camil’s travails don’t lead him to having any cryptic conversations with macabre undertones. On the contrary, most of his interactions in the film are painfully banal, to the point that they’re outright bizarre: from the empty discussions in his office (ostensibly a production company, for some extra meta-cinematic “salt and pepper”) to the monoglogues of the hippies living in the same commune as Andreea, filled with platitudes and false revelations, and a discussion with a strange neighbor that has shot a B movie together with the people living in the same high-rise.

Mammalia has been promoted as a film that is subversive and cheeky towards gender stereotypes, but I can’t help but wonder if the emperor isn’t in fact naked: is tis truly a parody of said stereotypes only because its main character is emasculated and subjected to situations that would be humiliating for a macho man, and because some more or less phallic symbols are thrown into the mix? Is that enough for a film to qualify as a critique of gender binarity, or is it just the pretext (or justification) for a dick joke that extends over eighty-something minutes? Far from having felt that the film criticizes the status quo and gender performativity, I perceived the exact opposite: an implicit reinforcement thereof.

Although it does have the merit of not looking or behaving like anything that has been shot in Romania in the last 30 years (maybe only slightly, with the bizarro indie short films of one Răzvan Mihai Badea), Mammalia is little more than a sterile exercise in beautified cinematography: its carefully crafted compositions and mise-en-scene, although often a treat for the eyes, cannot fill its narrative and conceptual void, as the film ends with a joke that makes the spectator feel like they’re the only punchline. But even so, I do think that one should keep an eye on Mihăilescu in the future. 

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Between Revolutions: a correspondence between archives 

Although it’s somewhat inadequate to call it a documentary – as the film’s voice-over narration is entirely fictional, scripted by novelist Lavinia Braniște and director Vlad Petri, inspired by letters discovered in the Romanian Secret Police archives – Between Revolutions is a non-fiction film whose plot is spread over a little bit over decade, covering the period immediately before the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979) and the period that immediately followed the Romanian Revolution (1989).

The narrative, presented in an epistolary format, becomes the link that ties two national histories and their archival footage, both public and private (incidentally, the credits mention that the private Iranian sources wished to maintain their anonymity), creating a contrast between the official narratives of the two countries, often highly propagandistic in tone, the private ones, which almost seem timeless. The very same tension between official and personal history reverberates in the correspondence between Maria and Zahra, two former med school classmates who kept in touch after the latter returned to her native country, wishing to participate in by the social upheaval that will end up leading to the fall of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

It’s tempting to say that Petri – the man behind Where are you, Bucharest?, a quintessential chronicler of Romania’s protest movements of 2010-2020, always keeping an eye on the pulse of the streets and searching out any and all public demonstrations – seem to have headed in an entirely different direction here than the one that established him. But his distinctive gaze is as present as can be in Between Revolutions: much of the archival footage used here, whether it’s from Romania or Iran, takes place in the streets – from the actual footage of the two Revolutions, to everyday footage from the streets that, in its surface-level calmness, reveals the mores and tendencies of their times. From women without veils in pre-revolutionary Iran, some handing out revolutionary leaflets in traffic, others protesting against the conservative forces of the Revolution, to passers-by on the streets of post-revolutionary Bucharest, criss-crossed by cars emblazoned with logos of foreign companies (Lucky Strike, Coca-Cola), heralding a new political and economic order.

The solitary figure isn’t often seen here – except for a notable sequence in which Maria writes about how she ran away from two men who were tailing her on the street, illustrated with an excerpt from a student short film, or in another scene, in which the same Maria describes her desire to go to the Romanian seaside with Zahra again, accompanied by almost surreal images of a diving competition. In doing so, it seems as if we are being told that Maria and Zahra could be any of the women who make their way into the frame, in two spaces that are otherwise deeply masculinist: the protests in Iran are absolutely dominated by male participants and figures, as are the images of political congresses and rallies in Romania, constructing the image of two public environments from which women are physically absent.

If, in the Sahia studio images (or those of the Ioan Agapi archive), we have more than enough clips of the pro-natalist propaganda that was typical of the Ceaușescu regime, images of women relegated to their domestic role, in those of post-revolutionary Iran, women are virtually invisible in the public space, with two exceptions. First, we see them queuing to vote for the Islamic Republic, covered in shrouds, and a few bare-headed women outside who are expressing their reservations about the new regime. Later, we see images  from Iran’s war against Iraq, including propaganda footage of the infamous all-female combat battalions. (Otherwise, the images from Iran underscore the deep social unrest and violence they experienced in the eighties; those from Romania, by contrast, are largely dominated by an unnatural calmness.)

Albeit fascinating (for example, I found myself smiling wistfully at the sight of the amusement parks on the seaside), the concurrent images from the two countries nevertheless seem to have been joined in a relatively artificial way – and I’m not necessarily referring to the underlying fictionalizing artifice of the correspondence between Maria and Zahra, which sometimes seems to miss out on some fruitful leads. For example, the Iranian woman does not – at any point – speak of the curtailment of her civil rights as a woman, only of a general disappointment with Khomeini’s regime and her vanishing hope for change, as she and her father were socialist activists. And the narrative also seems somewhat disjointed, uneven – Maria talks in an obsessive manner about Zahra in her letters, but the latter only rarely reacts to the former’s news, thus coming across as a little bit narcissistic. There’s another artifice – the two screenwriters included the verses of the two countries’ greatest modern female poets, Nina Cassian and Forough Farrokhzad (who died in 1967, way before the plot of the film is set to begin), that does little more than to add a poetic note to the letters.

The biggest issue is that bilateral relations of the two countries throughout the eighties are not at all explored, not even the episode Ceaușescu’s famous last diplomatic visit before his fall and execution, which took place in Tehran. Beyond the mere coincidence that the two protagonists were colleagues and friends, doesn’t provide that many Between Revolutions substantial reasons for its choice of conjoining these two national histories. Nor does the emotionless, almost accidentally Brechtian reading of Victoria Stoiciu (Maria) and Ilinca Hărnuț (Zahra) help, nor Braniște’s famous method of creating characters that are steeped in ennui – something which works extremely well in her novels, but that has a distancing effect here. And Between Revolutions isn’t the kind of film that relies on distancing, like Radu Jude’s Uppercase Print (2020) – on the contrary, it relies on immersion.

If, in Raluca Durbaca’s The Certainty of Probabilities (2021), the coordinates for choosing the archival footage in the film were as precise as possible – the year 1968, the concept ideology and propaganda, the paradoxical geopolitical and economic context of Romania – in Between Revolutions, it is not very clear at the end why the two countries treated in the film are Romania and Iran, beyond the filmmaker’s obvious interest in them, the parallels he finds between the two and the clearly enormous work he undertook to put the film together; but it is one that may well not translate into an equal interest on the part of the audience.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.