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THE TREASURE

Corneliu Porumboiu Romania, 2015
Corneliu Poromboiu's work is an acquired taste, to say the least. But if you can meet him on his uber-deadpan wavelength, The Treasure is his most successful film to date.
January 6, 2017
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The meticulousness of Porumboiu's form provides ironic contrast to the hapless bumbling of his characters, creating an abiding air of melancholy deadpan that's relieved only by the film's jarringly triumphalist final image, a swooping crane shot that soars up to the heavens. After so long staring at the ground, simply looking up can feel like liberation.
December 9, 2016
Drolly funny and rigorously executed, Corneliu Porumboui's The Treasure offers a fine example of the conceptual boldness that characterizes much of New Wave Romanian cinema. To anyone watching the film's early scenes, "boldness" may seem like the very last word to use: Stylistically, most of The Treasure is characterized by a dry functionality that speaks to the bureaucratic, financial, legalistic goings-on in the film. But that's kind of the point. And it's all going somewhere, trust me.
January 9, 2016
A certain hapless yet intent search marks the films of Romania's Corneliu Porumboiu... Porumboiu's droll, shaggy-dog style fosters that sensation, and it's in full effect in The Treasure—a perfectly drawn-out tale of two men, Costi and Adrian, who are searching for a supposed buried fortune belonging to Adrian's ancestors.
January 8, 2016
[Porumboiu's] best movies embody a kind of stylistic paradox: they are slow-paced, but also narratively concise; they contain long, slow scenes in which nothing in particular "happens" but they also feel entirely fat-free. Porumboiu's new picture "The Treasure" is entirely in keeping with that mode but also expands on it, with disarmingly delightful results. It is in a sense the director's first out-and-out comedy, and it's also something of a fairytale.
January 8, 2016
The direction that the film goes, if not necessarily a happy ending, is a surprise, culminating in the showiest camera movement the normally static-shot-oriented Porumboiu has ever attempted, a corkscrew crane ascent into the sun to the backing of Laibach's "Life is Life." To say more would be a shame, but the film represents some kind of artistic breakthrough for Porumboiu, his characteristic precision and discipline hitting a new apex of delightfulness that withholds less than usual.
January 8, 2016
Some may regard The Treasure as representing a very minor kind of cinema, as being little more than the Balkan equivalent of an O. Henry or Guy de Maupassant short story extended beyond its natural duration... But the ending, which may be a picture of desolation and folly, or of joyous contempt for acquisitiveness, puts its own delicate sheen on this small but keen gem.
January 7, 2016
Though some might be left yearning for the riskier gambits of Police, Adjective and When Evening Falls On Bucharest, Or Metabolism, this is still very much a product of Porumboiu's knack for earning unexpected laughs by never letting characters do anything cinematic. Surreally underplayed, The Treasure turns a wish-fulfillment fantasy (let's say our heroes aren't left empty-handed) into a post-Communist monkey's paw: You can have all the riches you want, but they're in Romania.
January 7, 2016
Romanian films feel long even when they aren't, but that's their peculiar appeal. Director Corneliu Porumboiu's tale of two sad sacks searching for buried treasure is full of static shots enabling us to savor the beep-beep of a metal detector, the scowl of a bureaucrat or the fact that apparently no one in Bucharest believes in decorating their walls... The film is an unusual mixture of joy and cynicism.
January 6, 2016
It's a film of matter-of-fact simplicity, despite its meta-ness (Purcarescu comes off as a shifty weasel playable by John Hawkes in an American version, and there's no telling if his testy impatience and dishonesty are genuine, the actor's riff, or Porumboiu's take on the real man). In what may be the quietest heist movie ever made, the logistics are everything.
January 5, 2016
Corneliu Porumboiu has a genius for hitting on subjects as wide in their implications as they are small in scale: a single episode of a local TV news show (12:08 East of Bucharest, 06); a routine drug arrest (Police, Adjective, 09); a soccer match (The Second Game, 14). His new film is both another testament to his eye for telling details and his most seamless combination yet of fiction and fact.
January 4, 2016
[Porumboiu's] latest, The Treasure, represents an inspired addition to his delightful cinema of contradictions: it is at once hilarious yet rigorous, moving yet droll, patient yet lean, and unapologetically political yet tactful in how it dissects its subject.
October 19, 2015