Aurora (Sunday, July 3, 2011) (49)

Cristi Puiu's first major film to be released in the States, The Death of Mr. Lasarescu (2006), is an amazing existentialist story of life and death in Post-Communist Bucharest. It is the most successful and greatest of the Romanian New Wave films to hit these shores, incredibly simple in story (a man slowly dies over the course of 150 minutes and we watch unable to do anything about it), reserved but powerful in style and devoid of any real structure. It's the very definition of the RomWave. In his newest film, Aurora, which he wrote, stars in and directs, Puiu brings us another brilliant work, this time even more obscure and more unlike anything we've seen before... and this time adds another half hour of content.

The story of the film is so very unclear (or unknown), that it's enough to just know the basic characters involved. Viorel (Puiu) is a 40-something man with two young daughters and a woman who seems to be his wife. He also has an elderly mother he looks after and she has a new husband who he hates. The film opens with him talking about the daughters with his wife in the kitchen as she gets dressed. She gives him a bag lunch and sends him off. For the next 45 minutes or so he wanders around with no particular direction, at some point buying a shotgun. It is never totally clear that he has a job or anywhere to be and circles back to places he has already been several times.

Unlike Mr. Lasarescu, and unlike Radu Muntean's recent Tuesday, After Christmas, this is not really about the brokenness of Bucharest and the old Communisty aesthetic, nor is it about how the city is a modern European capital. It falls somewhere in between. We see the back allies and rail yards (which look crappy in any town in the world), and also see the fancy boutiques on the boulevard.

When action does pick up a bit (it never really gets much faster than a crawl, but at some point there are a few things that happen) there is a sense that there is an everyday human level to living and a separate "rule-of-law" world of right and wrong, but the two remain separate. This is not too dissimilar from Puiu's comment in Mr. Lasarescu, that people die and the system can't help them, though in that it's rather directed at the whole system (hospitals, medical care, ambulances), while here it's more directly existentialist about the inevitability of stuff and the fact that the police (or lack of them) are an agent, but not the pure cause of badness. Viorel never rushes, he never panics, he walks and drives around carefully, knowing full well that he is heading in a specific direction.

It's impossible to proceed without mentioning all that the story owes to Camus, Sartre, Becket, Antonini and Bergman. It is clear that Puiu is a good reader and watcher and that he's studied his nihilistic absurdest existentialists. Life for Viorel is a series of moments that connect to one another; for us, however, his story is somewhat choppy and sometimes unmotivated. Puiu never gives us much background on actions. Viorel does things that don't totally make sense and then we have to either guss at their meanings or wait until they're explained (three hours later). In this way, Puiu puts us in the story by showing us that life is about randomness and non-understanding. Puiu might have a direction, but it's unclear to everyone else. Life for us is about experiencing other people as they go about their business without explaining thier actions to us. This hyperrealism is one of the keys of the RomWave and it is fantastic.

Just because the film is 181 minutes long, doesn't mean it's boring or dull. One of my favorite things about the film is the amazing dialogue and the fact that Puiu's script is full of jokes and humor. Yes, most of it is dark comedy, but it's very entertaining, particularly toward the end, when Viorel's tour is revealed to us a bit more. He's the world's greatest baadasssss, at times talking back to school teachers and kindergarten classmates of his daughters, insulting his mother's new beau or scolding the police. He says what we all wish we could say, but don't figure out until it's a minute too late. (There's also a fantastic piss joke around minute 178.)

I'm a bit stumped by the title of the film. I guess this is about the dawn of a new day for Viorel, or possibly a dawn of a new era for Bucharest and Romania. Perhaps it refers to how when we see stars and light they're actually gone light years ago or that there is no substance to lights in the sky, but just gasses and electricity. All of this connects to Viorel's situation, that we don't really notice him until he does something big or talks back to others.

Stars: 4 of 4