Critics reviews

If Jude risks tidiness in contrasting the new corporate Romania’s insistence on producing the image of an idiotically giddy consumerist subject with the subsistence-level reality of the individuals lucky enough to be picked to fill this role, his willingness to root comedy in the exhaustion and tedium of even a single afternoon’s effort in this failed process of low-grade social engineering makes clear that, from the first, he possessed a fine sense of the relationship between style and meaning.

Despite his commercials background, Jude shoots the film in what is now becoming so familiar as generically Romanian mise en scène that it’s in danger of becoming hackneyed. Most scenes consist of two- or three-way conversations, typically shot in long, unshowy takes by a largely static camera.

With its long takes, mainly static camera set-ups, authentic locations and sparing use of music (in this case The Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Rent’) The Happiest Girl in the World has, stylistically at least, plenty in common with other recent ‘realist’ Romanian films. Jude has fashioned an amusing study of the laborious filmmaking process.

Romania has perhaps not turned out to be the cinema powerhouse it briefly threatened after the success of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and The Death of Mr Lazarescu; but this gentle, droll satire is well worth watching as it takes aim at the confusions of the post-communist world in an oblique, subtle way.

Although the humour gets slightly stuck in the same furrow, there’s obviously more at stake here, since this pointed vignette evidently encapsulates a society in transition... Thankfully, the central metaphor never overwhelms the story...

The set-up is rock-solid, with detail and characterisation – particularly thorny internal family dynamics – sketched with an impressively acute eye. But we get the point pretty early on, and the result is that rather than being sucked into Delia’s claustrophobic dilemma we end up pondering where Jude might go from this moderately promising enterprise.

Using gridlocked roads and repetitions to emphasise the country’s lack of direction, Radu Jude lampoons outmoded provincial attitudes, yet it’s Bosneag’s shift from sullen rebel to supreme manipulator that makes it so comically compelling.

Conveying tedium far too effectively, The Happiest Girl in the World fixates on close-ups of Delia’s gloomy face while falling into a back-and-forth narrative rut that it never quite escapes. Its few moments of movie-production humor provide the only sparks of energy, and its tense familial bickering ultimately squanders any sense of authentic parent-child dynamics by failing to progress past its starting point in an engaging manner.

Director Jude obviously has larger themes on his mind — perhaps something involving the concupiscence of human beings, especially under roaring capitalism, or even better, the very meaning of happiness itself — but a plethora of dialogue-less long takes of the brooding Delia don’t do much to actually bring them home to his audience.