Tales from the Golden Age

These Romanian Tales Reveal a (Thankfully) Forgotten World
As a correspondent for U.S. newspapers, I arrived in Romania when the Communist-era system of lies and secrecy had completely collapsed. The chaos was unimaginable. My plane landed so soon after the 1989 revolution that no customs agents were left at the airport. The first government offices I visited were empty. Grocery store shelves were bare. I found many who dared to talk honestly for the first time in their lives.

So, I lapped up every minute of the 141-minute Tales of the Golden Age by Christian Mungiu and his Romanian filmmaking friends. (Mungiu wrote the scripts, then invited other young filmmakers to shoot the sequences.) Now in its complete form, the film is a series of comedic episodes about life under the half-crazed dictator Nicolai Ceausescu.

The Legend of the Official Visit, the opening vignette in the film, is the most amusing and fully realized of all these tales--and the scene depicted on the new DVD cover. Set in a remote rural village, the...

From the Silly to the Poignant
These six vignettes written by Cristian Mungiu of the famed "4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days" and directed by himself and four others begins in a rather silly vein with "The Legend of the Official Visit", but gradually moves to the more lengthy and oddly believable "The Legend of the Air Sellers" and then the extremely poignant and well-acted "The Legend of the Chicken Driver". This last segment makes all the others work in a profound way, pondering the sadness of materialism over human value and love, the conflict of political obedience over a natural love of material comfort, and to make it full circle, the reality of selfishness and fear over true camaraderie and compassion. The script of "The Chicken Driver" is sheer genius, exploiting the concept of natural "profit" and chickens. (I won' spoil the story.) This metaphorical richness weaves a brilliant story thanks in part to the subtle acting of Vlad Ivanov, star of "4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days" and the excellent "Police Adjective"...

A Great way to understand what life was like in the Eastern Bloc
This film is really 6 short stories about some "urban myths" from communist Romania. The film focuses on what life was like for different people in different situations, during the Ceaucescu era.

Each film gives a snapshot with a kind of moral to what life was like. I have worked and lived in post communist Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany during the early 1990's and Russia 2009 onwards. I have also visited virtually every other country of the Eastern Bloc including Romania. As such I gained a unique insight into the reality of what life was like behind the Iron Curtain before it disappeared. My first lesson to this surreal world was what I saw in the border town of Cheb Czechoslovakia in 1990. It was as if we had stepped back in time to the 1930's. Buildings falling apart, few goods in the shops, no advertising boards and blocks of flats that were grey and falling to pieces. Nobody looked happy and everyone looked so depressed. We were accosted all the time to barter...

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