Inspired by the work of the Romanian play-writer I.L. Caragiale, a bitter-funny witness of the 20th turn-of-the-century Romanian burgeois mores, the movie manages to grasp the cheap, frantic, colourful and slightly hysteric atmosphere of Caragiale’s plays.
The movie’s director, Lucian Pintilie, is one of the few success stories of the Romanian cinema. He turns the classical, linear plot of the play into a zigzagged scenario, combining it with several other Caragiale’s short-stories. The result is a weird combination of crazy carnival scenes and short, alienated insertions reminding of Antognioni’s Red Desert. A burlesque, fast-paced, snowball-like comedy (because, after all, it remains a comedy) with plenty of post-modernist auto-reflexivity and deep meditative undertones. —IMDb
Born in 1933 in Southern Bessarabia (part of Ukraine since the 1940s), Lucian Pintilie studied film and theatre in Bucharest. He began his directing career in theatre before turning to film. Although his films were internationally praised—Sunday at Six won The Grand Prize of the International Youth Jury in the 1966 Cannes Festival; Reenactment was presented in the official selection of Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, 1969 Cannes; Ward Six won Un Certain Regard at the 1979 Cannes Festival—Pintilie was in a continuous fight with the Romanian communist authorities. After Reenactment was banned in 1969, and his theatre production of The Inspector was banned in 1972, Pintilie was forbidden to work in theatres and had only two more films produced, the last of which—Carnival Scenes—was also banned for 10 years, to be officially released only in 1991. Pintilie was ultimately pressured by the authorities to leave Romania in 1982. For twenty years he lived and worked in France and the United States… read more
