Reconstruction review – teens re-enact crimes for state-driven pantomime in communist Romania

Lucian Pintilie’s grimly ironic 1968 film is based on real events, in which delinquents are forced to act out their brawl in front of government cameras

Lucian Pintilie’s Romanian film from 1968 is a bizarre and wayward political satire that at first involves just a handful of people – and finally unveils a dreamlike crowd scene with hundreds of non-professionals swarming across the screen, their expressions of incomprehension and incredulity pressed into service for fiction. Yet the whole thing is stranger than fiction – more metaphorical, more metatextual than fiction – and, of course, taken from real life.

Pintilie co-wrote the screenplay with Romanian author Horia Patrascu, based on Patrascu’s novel about an extraordinary event that took place in the early 1960s. Two drunken, hapless youths were caught brawling at a riverside cafe and were made to re-enact the event in detail for a solemn instructional film produced by the communist party authorities to be shown in schools, offices and clubs as a terrible warning against alcohol and anti-social bourgeois delinquency. The two stars of this strange film are moreover tacitly expected to redeem their offence, to expunge their sins moment-by-moment, by recreating their lives in the service of state-sponsored morality. (The actual official film that inspired this, on which Patrascu worked as a crew member, presumably exists in an archive somewhere.)