Critics reviews

Arguably the best film of 2016, and a massive success for the Romanian auteur. This mix of social critique, absurdist comedy, Ionescoian/Beckettian impulses and idle conversation, all set inside the ominous walls of a 50-square-metre apartment, is both a superb undertaking of synchronicity and performance and an impeccable combination of mise en scène and script.

A kind of miraculous intimate family epic, constructed like a farce, but with the emotional resonance of Shakespearean comic tragedy; we circulate through rooms in a large apartment where a family is always about to celebrate a memorial service. Everything is happening at once, in every register available in post-Socialist Romania (political, emotional, sexual, social …).

If I had to choose a single favorite from the films I've seen so far at the festival, it would be a hard choice between Sieranevada and A Quiet Passion. I have to say, though, that Sieranevada is much funnier, though it took me longer than it should have to figure out that it's a comedy. Watching the lengthy opening shot, which largely involves the main character's car being double parked and blocking a DHL truck, I did quickly realize that I was seeing a terrific film.

Cristi Puiu, who in 2005 gave the movement its first international success with The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, offers up Sieranevada, a bravura chamber piece and a sharply observed family portrait whose real subject is the inheritance each generation leaves for the next.

The visual perspective in this three-hour epic is athletic and dexterous, but also, above all, objective in the manner of a great non-interventionist documentary by Allan King or Patricio Guzmán; that it is as easy to forget the presence of the camera as the fact that the arguments and confrontations it catalogues are the by-product of thrillingly skillful filmmaking acting rather than authentic, captured reality suggests something of this marvelous movie's total triumph.

Puiu redirects and amplifies conventional set-ups in this inclusive extended-family drama.

It's a bewildering, bitter, and amusing affair, as is family life; in fact, the film's scale, in which long arguments extinguish themselves only to flame up again at the opening of a door, resembles lived experience much more closely than a moral tale, or one signifying nothing.

It offers a stylistic tour de force in which a ritual family gathering, presented with an almost anthropological avidity for details, as well as drolly understated wit, involves conversations touching on everything from 9/11 conspiracy theories to Romania's Communist past.

Like the film's unexplained title, the barely muffled anger and violence of the social ills at Sieranevada's core hint at but never reveal the larger political chaos seemingly waiting to erupt just off camera.

We must wait two-and-a-half hours for the film's big reveal, and even then it is something of an anti-climax, but Puiu is evidently concerned more with the minutiae of the daily interactions between close friends and relatives than he is with narrative pyrotechnics.

To separate camera from narrative, thus distancing us from the drama without diminishing its punch, takes nerve, virtuosity, and an appreciation of how movies create and mediate emotion via movement in space. The most seductive movies in Cannes played with form so that the human comedy—the comedy of mortality—was made strange and new.

Cristi Puiu hosts a wake of a different kind in Sieranevada, one of the strongest and certainly most daunting selections in this year's Cannes Competition (which, instructively enough, also featured Cristian Mungiu's comparatively pro-forma Graduation). Running 173 minutes, Puiu's first narrative feature since the polarizing Un Certain Regard standout Aurora (2010) pushes forward as furiously as the earlier film held firm with distinct and disquieting reserve.