Lucian Pintilie, The Oak (Romania, 1993)

According to Odette Caufman-Blumenfeld, The Oak successfully displays Romania's "loquacity" and "colorful language... in order to make a clear political statement: to swear and to snap the fingers at the others have long become a Romanian way of reacting to and/or resisting terror, privations, and interdictions of all kinds" This statement points to the representation of Romania's personality, which may be accurate on some level. However, it is a stretch to think of The Oak as primarily a realist film.

In the sense that heavy cursing is in play here to demonstrate the rebellious attitude towards censorship and corruption, Pintilie rebels against socialist realist propaganda that romanticized the positive sides of Romania and suppressed negative counterparts. As Cale Kehoe discusses here, we are carried along through the narrative not by a logical sequence of events, but rather through the protagonist's reactions to the world.

Nela is the eccentric central personality who takes off to find the doctor supposedly responsible for her father's death. We meet Nela in her apartment as she and her father watch old videos, presumably of Nela as a young girl in that very apartment years back during Christmas time pretend-shooting the extended family with a toy gun (or an unloaded real one?) and the family pretend-dropping dead. We discover later in the apartment scene that the father is really laying dead in Nela's bed, in a Faulker-esque (see A Rose For Emily) sort of way. Pintilie seems to pick up where Faulker left off as he opens his story with the shocking, and somewhat necrophiliactic, episode following the freakish protagonist's wallow in the past.

Her sister attempts to reconcile with Nela, knocking on the door hysterically soon after the morbid reveal, but Nela just refuses her sister and vomits before setting the apartment on fire. Later, she phones for a second reconciliation attempt, but we discover that Nela's contempt for her sister is rooted in patriarch-envy (In case anyone had their doubts, Pintilie can do the Oedipal thing too. Maybe there is something to be said here about pop-science/literature allusions which end up thematically scant in their new context.)

Throughout the confusing disjointed progression of events, we get a sense of Romania's mood post-Ceauşescu times. Made after Ceauşescu's death and the subsequent fall of communism, the film is retrospective commentary on communist Romania. The common phrase repeated again and again, primarily by the older characters, is: asta-i viaţa, or an insouciant "oh well, that's life" attitude. The film seems to scorn traditional ideologies because, when comparing the indifference of the older people with the promising hope expressed by the young couple, the younger generation is assigned agency in the greater social environment. It's kind of like Pintilie is saying: even if you are totally fucked up to burn your own house down, deny the fact that your father is an asshole, sleep with his dead body in your bed, and carry his ashes around everywhere you go; you can still change the world for the better or at least have babies who will (think they can) when you get old and obsolete. Lastly, a private burial paired with budding love both taking place under an oak tree was definitely a charming ending.