There is much talk about local commercial cinema – what it is, how it’s done, what it’s good at and, especially, not good at. The sacrifices that are made during such discussions are enormous – not sacrifices of money or blood, but rather of nuance; but this is something that is rather more specific to debates which play out on social media.

Among such debates, however, there is at times a flicker of lucidity. I’ve recently heard a very just opinion, which was expressed in passing – La Gomera, Corneliu Porumboiu’s latest feature film, isn’t a commercial film, but rather an audience-oriented film. The difference in nuance was based on a noble premise – that is, the film’s box office, cast, actors but also its formal aspects, ranging from an Iggy Pop tune on the soundtrack to the gags and jokes tinged with a local flavor, which were counterbalanced by the James Bond-esque atmosphere of the shooting locations. Nothing pejorative, rushed, or absolute. Which is to say that I see things in the same way – that we need a discourse that is much more articulated when it comes to validating the existence of a Romanian audience-oriented cinema, rather than deepening the chasm between commercial and (so-called) art-house cinema down to abyssal depths.

At last, here is a new audience-oriented movie, which is neither esoteric nor commercial through the nature of its production – Ivana the Terrible, the sophomore feature of the Serbo-Romanian director Ivana Mladenović, which is co-written by Adrian Schiop. And it needs to be said that it’s probably one of the funniest Romanian films, or, at the very least, the funniest to come out since the 2000s.

In contrast to Soldiers: Story from Ferentari, her excellent 2017 debut feature, Ivana the Terrible is based on an original script. However, judging by all appearances, the two screenwriters manage to preserve the parameters of auto-fiction (Soldiers being an adaptation of Schiop’s eponymous auto-fictional novel). Mladenović performs the role of a director-actress named Ivana Milenković, who left her hometown (Kladovo) for the better part of the last 15 years, which she has spent on finishing her studies and starting a career in Romania. Does that sound familiar? Returning from Bucharest, where she seems to have a hip lifestyle, Ivana attempts to treat her burnout and hypochondria with a little bit of parental care, some sun and a romantic escapade with a younger neighbor, much too young to prevent the local badmouthing from spreading around. Still, meanwhile, she becomes the star of a local festival dedicated to the friendship between Serbians and Romanians, a situation which Mladenović exploits for its motley humor.

In Ivana, everyone seems not just to act themselves, but also to act themselves out, which offers the film an additional element of performativity. We can infer that every member of Ivana’s family is acting something that lies at the crossroads of biography, improvisation and caricature, and this is also the case of the musicians that appear in the film, Andrei Dinescu and Anca Pop (whom, after the shooting, was involved in a fatal car accident), who are friends of the protagonist. However, most of the time this additional element results in nervous breakdowns which dissolve into laughter, leaving the impression of a fragmentary film, which is built from material that, in a normative narration, would have been left on the cutting floor. It’s a sort of reined-in making-of movie – which sometimes proves to be very charming, especially as an experiment (how long can you make this shot last?), while Mladenović’s generosity of partially exposing herself in front of the audience is flattering but also disquieting, if not outright cringey for the audience.

The cherry on top of it all is the fact that Mladenović’s character is suffering from severe hypochondria, which is the ideal catalyst for much of the film’s humor. But it’s also easy to see how the director has served herself many situations on a silver plate, activating stereotypes for the laughter’s sake, and, especially, seeing as Ivana the Terrible is an easy-going, self-possessed film, cast in the shape of its protagonist’s profile – the zippy camera is there for better or for worse, every single inhabitant seems willing to run her through the marriage and children query, and Milenković is so vehement in her uncompromising attitude that there isn’t any real tension in the series of small confrontations between her and the others. Some things are so complicated for the protagonist (like accounting for her relationship with her neighbor) that it’s almost suspicious how simple other situations are.

The humor of the film fits in a greater image which has been floating around in the air for some time, which is best represented by the meme pages on Facebook and Instagram such as Squatting Slavs In Tracksuits and Slavorum. In short, the content of these two pages is mostly made up of photos with comedic elements, which lie at the intersection between Eastern-European kitsch, a sort of camp sensibility that is just ours, folklore and pop culture, the vast majority being reduced to clichees through a post-ironic lens – porcelain figurines, palinka, american spies, crocheted décor, potholes, and gallows humor. The film even starts on such a note, a conflict between the protagonist and two elderly women who are protesting a meeting about yoga, ragging on about religious sects and conspiracies..

Of course, this type of humor has been successfully used by Corneliu Porumboiu in his short films (which predate 12:08 East of Bucharest), but also in some more unsuccessful films such as Two Lottery Tickets (dir. Paul Negoescu, 2016). But Mladenović is the first one to arrive with a completely different gaze, with a discourse which raises questions about the concept of identity (how much is a character such as hers, which is now an outsider, still capable of feeling home?). The small universe of Kladovo is ridiculed, even lampooned, but more often than not it’s warmly fondled. The film’s economy makes space for funny scenes with Town Hall functionaries which indulge in provincialism, but also for moments of tenderness or playfulness, such as the one in which the young woman lies in the sun while her grandmother is caressing her, or the one in which she is sunbathing at the beach and is snuggling with her secret boyfriend.

A certain sequence in which Ivana is watching a Yugoslav short film with English subtitles along with her Romanian friends (Anca Pop and Andrei Dinescu), which is screened in a cutting-edge Serbain museum, is the best way to resume this identitarian fumbling that I’ve been mentioning. These are the hardships that seem to be crushing, suffocating for the protagonist, and Ivana is, in spite of its large number of characters, a one-woman-show that is at times sophisticated, at times rudimentary, but always spellbinding; not fascinating, but rather charming. 

Călin Boto

Film critic and journalist. He is an editor at AARC and writes the ”Screens” features for Art Magazine. He collaborates with many publications and film festivals as a freelancer and he is strangely attached to John Ford's movies.