The
UK Independence Party has won a national election for the first time,
taking the most votes and seats in the European Parliament elections.
Ukip gained ten new MEPs and finished taking 27.5 per cent of
the vote and 23 MEPs (The Daily Telegraph)
Dear
Nigel,
Didn't
you do well. You've really stuck it to the out-of-touch metro elite,
those Berlaymont
bureaucrats, their Westminster cronies and of course the left wing
media. Purple may be your party colour but you're no shrinking
violet, so I'm sure you'll take anything I've got to say on the chin.
Approximately 4 million British voters were won over by your
xenophobic scaremongering and appeals to provincial sovereignty. The
political establishment of Britain is failing to win the argument and
ill fares the land with a party like yours. Democratically, Ukip has
spread through open door inflammation.
Among
all the barbarian invaders there is one group that seems to bother
Ukip no end. You
know who I mean.
On the first page of your manifesto you describe Romanians as a
devious gang of fraudsters, rapists and murderers. “28,000 are held
for crimes in London” it incorrectly claims. (The figure of 28,000
-or more accurately, 27,725- is for the number
of arrests made
over five years from 2008 to 2012, not
the number
of people.
One shoplifter can be arrested and re-arrested dozens of times. The
nationality of a criminal is a non-robust statistic based on how the
person describes themselves when arrested hence the inclusion in
police records of a number of countries that no longer exist -the
Irish Free State, British Central Africa- or indeed have never
existed e.g. Ruritania.) Even if we put aside your dodgy data the
singling out of one group is at best mean spirited and at worst
tantamount to racism. Contrary to your fears accession to full EU
membership in January did not lead to the Romanian conquests of your
high streets and neighbourhoods. Recent figures show that there are
slightly fewer Romanians working in the UK in the first quarter of
this year compared to the previous quarter. You are 33 times more
likely to have a Ukip voter for a neighbour than a Romanian.
Rather
than hurl insults I'd like to offer a solution to your “Romanian
problem”. You probably don't watch films in foreign languages; you
would rather sit down to watch The
Great Escape where
foreign accents are little more than comedic or menacing devices to
set off Anglo-American heroism. I read that
your favourite film is Zulu;
why couldn't you have shocked us all and said Ma
Nuit Chez Maud?
If
you did watch world cinema you might know some of the great films
that have been coming out of Romania in the last ten years. This new
wave of filmmaking has been lauded by broadsheet critics and rewarded
at posh European festivals, but don't let this put you off. These
films have a profound understanding of humanity and much to teach us,
Ukip included. And it is because of this empathy that I'm reaching
out and asking you to join me on a trip through new Romanian cinema.
You might be disappointed at the lack of violence -at least not of
the criminal gang kind- and if you are expecting a miserabilist
survey of poverty and desperation you will be surprised to discover
that the Romania of films like Tuesday
After Christmas and
Child's
Pose
has all the modern comforts and consumerist tendencies of Oxford
Circus.
 |
| The Happiest Girl in the World |
Isn't
part of your appeal Nigel that you speak for downtrodden middle
Englanders neglected by the Westminster elite. Romanian cinema has a
lot to say about power: it's relative rather than absolute,
possessing it requires that others are powerless.
The
Happiest Girl in the World is
a darkly comic observation of the everyday forces that bully us into
submission. It's about a girl, Delia, who wins a car in a competition
organised by a softdrink company and, in order to claim her prize,
has to star in an advert. First criticised for not being sufficiently
photogenic (“she has a moustache!”) then obliged to act out her
scene a torturous number of times for an increasingly irritable
director, we begin to share in Delia's pain as each take she forces a smile, gulps down the sugary drink (“drink, drink, drink!”) and
speaks of her complete and utter happiness. During the filming breaks
Delia's father pressures her, through emotional manipulation, to let
him sell the car and use the money to convert their house into a B&B.
The
Happiest Girl in the World
is set in a modern, trendy Bucharest, but in many ways it could be
the dark days of communism. State propaganda may have turned into
consumerist advertising but the feelings of the individual are still
ignored. The Cristian
Mungiu-produced Tales
from the Golden Age is
an omnibus compilation of satirical stories about life
under Ceaușescu.
Each composite chapter, concise and amusing as they are, knows how to
speak truth to authoritarian power. My favourite segment, 'The
Legend of the Air Sellers' is Bonnie
and Clyde
by way of Bill Forsyth. In it a pair of bored teenagers, Bughi and
Crina, attempt to make a bit of cash through posing as water
inspectors and asking unsuspecting residents to hand over a bottle of
tap water for testing and then exchanging the bottles for a modest
return. They deploy the fear of the unknown, invisible dangers
lurking in our midst, backed by statistics and the façade of
respectability. Sound familiar? Ambition ultimately gets the better
of them as a plan to exhort a whole tower block of bottles through an
air pollution hoax raises too many suspicions.
If
Air Sellers is a warning about becoming a victim of one's success,
'The Legend of the Party
Activist' cautions us against dogma. Of
course you don't do ideology do you? You claim to preach 'common
sense', although as a privately educated, chauvinistic ex-banker
you're neither common nor sensitive. In this segment the eponymous
official takes to heart instructions from a party boss that the
greatest threat to Romania is illiteracy. He heads off to a rural
backwater to make enlightenment his mission. The village population
tell him that, as nice as it would be to read, the need for
electricity is of greater urgency, and besides they're too busy on
their farms to attend classes. You'll probably laugh at the
overzealous efforts of the party official, maybe his unimaginative
dictates will remind you of those Brussels apparatchiks. But his talk
of empowering local communities -whilst also lecturing them on what
is good for them- reminds me of all your appeals to everything
'local'. The word appears 42 times in your 12-page manifesto and
seems to be synonymous with democracy and empowerment. But if bad
policy is when decisions are taken by the few without consulting the
many why do you demand for Britain's exit of the EU when a majority
of the public
stand against this? You do not speak for Britain.
As
for the party activist, he ends up being electrified by lightning,
appropriately enough.
Your
Britain, of empowered municipalities minus the wasteful executives
and politically correct jobs, of grammar schools and bobbies on the
beat, of low taxes and turbine-free parkland, will still have an NHS
free at the point of use (although proof of Britishness may be
required). But if you get rid of all those meddling managers and
bureaucrats it will mean that doctors, already over-stretched and in
short supply (the NHS is currently propped up by imports of foreign
doctors, something that you would also presumably seek to curb),
would have to shoulder the administrative burden. On that note, let me
show you The
Death of Mr Lazarescu. Cristi
Puiu's stunning film, at times exasperating but always spot on in its
commitment to the reality of its characters, tells of a lonely old
man who gets sick and is ferried from hospital to hospital in search
of treatment by a plain speaking but dedicated paramedic. Mr
Lazarescu chose the wrong night to fall ill; Saturday is always busy
and tonight there's been a bus accident. With packed out wards and
little semblance of order -there's not a manager in sight- the medics
that he encounters are not able to give Lazarescu the attention he
requires.
What
makes The
Death of Mr Lazarescu
an extraordinary film is its exploration of humanity. This
complicates our response; rather than simply being a critique of the
failure to provide adequate care to a dying man, the film finds a way
to meditate on how we all, without necessarily meaning to, become cut
off from empathy. In less subtle hands the doctors would have been
either unfeeling and dismissive or sensitive and immediately
discerning of the real problem with Mr Lazarescu. Puiu gives us
neither. Take the first doctor to see Lazarescu; he is curt, on the
grumpy side and responds to the sight of the hall outside his office
thronged with patients requiring his attention with an unenthusiastic
acceptance (as if to say, I'm
really not paid enough for this).
His attitude towards our suffering protagonist is seemingly
dismissive- Mr Lazarescu should not have been drinking so much with
his condition. “Doctor, my head hurts” says the supine patient,
to which the doctor snidely remarks “Good, that means you've got
one”. Yet when Lazarescu is out of earshot the doctor's tune subtly
changes. He reveals to the paramedic that he is concerned for the old
man and is sorry that, with the hospital inundated with bus accident
patients, there's nothing he can do tonight. In light of this his
earlier severe lecturing to Lazarescu takes on a new form of genuine
care, mixed with the despair that hospitals are full of people like
this. These subtle shifts in tone that reveal greater complexities of
characters are not achieved through emotional close-ups or a
sentimental soundtrack (the basic aesthetic tools of most hospital
dramas). Stylistically Puiu's camera remains a neutral observer.
Worn
out but committed to getting her patient seen, the stony heart of the
film is the paramedic Mioara (played by the greatest of all Romanian
actresses Luminita Gheorghiu). This reminds us that women are so
often at the centre of Romanian cinema. Ukip, which doesn't have any
female MEPs, isn't renown for its progressive attitudes towards
women. Didn't your old comrade in charms Godfrey Bloom once say that
no employer with a brain would hire a woman? And didn't you once brag
about “so many women” you've knocked up over the years? If we are
to believe your self-proclaimed virility then, as a father of three
by two women, there are presumably other women that didn't follow
through with furthering the Farage clan. I don't know to what degree
you supported them, but it certainly doesn't strike me as something
to joke about. You'd faint if you went through half of what the women
of Cristian Mungiu
films go through. This (male) director understands like few others
the strength of empathy in women, a realm that, like Julia Kristeva's
notion of semiotic expression, is an emotional field beyond language.
The
face of Otilia in 4
Months, 3 weeks, 2 Days
tells us everything. She has just arrived at a dinner party at her
boyfriend's parent's house. They are all prominent types –
cardiologists, professors- and the table is set with fancy food and
foreign liquor, neither of which are especially common in the Romania
of the 1980s (this is the very dark side to the tales of the golden
age). What nobody knows is that she has just come from a dingy hotel
room where she has been helping her friend abort a pregnancy in the
company of a hired abortionist called Bebe (played with
spine-tingling menace by Vlad Ivanov). Illegal abortions, common in
Ceaușescu's
Romania, were nonetheless extremely dangerous (at least 10,000 women
died between 1966-1989) and Mungiu captures this event with grisly
honesty. And thus the striking juxtaposition of the posh dinner
table. For a nearly 10 minute, unedited shot we watch Otilia sit at
the head of the table, wedged in between the Bucharest bourgeois and
awkwardly attempting to fit in with their polite conversation. Just
as with the depiction of a life-threatening abortion Mungiu's camera
spares us no discomfort as he hones in on Otilia's distracted face as
it tries to disguise her desperation with the appearance of social
nervousness. Mungiu's style is naturalistic -no fancy sound editing
or clever cuts- but the weight of Otilia's presence seems to
partially mute the surrounding chatter. This may be a subtitle issue;
I find it difficult in this scene to take in all the transcribed
dialogue while sensing what's on Otilia's mind. Like her we're
distracted, and things can't just return to as they were before.
 |
| Cornelia in 'Child's Pose' |
Another
great film of Romanian cinema, Calin Peter Netzer's Child's
Pose,
is about a woman in love. This is a powerful, unique piece; at once a
story of the unequal, obsessive love of a mother for her son and a
morality tale of inequalities in wealth and power that underline the
fragile social structures of post-communist Romania. As the Captain
says to Cool Hand Luke, what
we've got here is a failure to communicate.
Cornelia
(Luminita
Gheorghiu, once again luminous)
is an affluent interior decorator, lives in a palatial home and
socialises with the great and good of Bucharest high society. All,
however, is not well with her only son Barbu, a spoilt man-child who
spurns his mother's affection (but not her financial support).
Cornelia keeps tabs on Barbu through her housekeeper, who also cleans
the son's flat, taking note of everything from how he looks to what
he's reading (“I've bought him Herta Müller and Pamuk!” she
exclaims, showing how her maternal nurturing extends to a diet of
Nobel laureates).
When
Barbu runs over a child whilst speeding and faces a sentence of
manslaughter Cornelia springs into action, mobilising as much as she
can of her resources and social connections to ensure that her son
avoids prison. What is most striking throughout the film is how the
intensity of Cornelia's efforts to secure Barbu's freedom is matched
by the son's increasing degree of disgust for his mother's
sacrifices. That the source of Barbu's animosity is never revealed
suggests that this filial revulsion stems from something suppressed
and non-communicable; an Oedipal overcompensation perhaps?
For
Cornelia, despite everything, Barbu remains the apple of her eye. The
warped extent of the mother's fantasy is shown in an extraordinary
scene when Cornelia visits the parents of the killed child. They are
poor people but proud too and will not have their own son's life so
easily bought off. Cornelia proceeds to beg for Barbu's life,
describing how he is such a generous, sweet boy. Her mind seems
locked onto a past Barbu (perhaps entirely fictitious), one who “had
two years of figure skating lessons and a very beautiful body”, a
boy who was all hers. She isn't really making sense to the bereaved
parents, who can barely afford to send their children to school. Like
so many characters in the film she is reacting to, rather than
interacting with, others. The reactive handheld style camerawork
makes this especially evident; the camera lingers on Cornelia's face
before a delayed lurch round to capture the other speaking
characters. Even the camera is failing to communicate.
The
title of Netzer's film is derived from a restful yoga pose, a
wonderfully ambiguous reference. Meditation is something that a lot
of Romanian films are good at. You could use some meditative moments
Nigel. All this hyperactive campaigning and rushing around from
podium to pub, across the “length and breadth of the country”...
what a contrast to the moments of stillness and contemplation that we
find in many of the films I've mentioned. One of the most carefully
composed of Romanian films is Tuesday,
After Christmas. It tells the simple
story of man who is a having an affair with his daughter's dentist.
He loves this woman but he also feels comfortable with his family
life. He knows that his enjoyment of these separate moments of his
life, as father and husband and as lover, cannot be maintained
forever. The film is full of single shot moments. Radu Muntean's
minimalist style of long static takes contains his characters,
usually no more than two per scene, in the framed cinespace of our
movie screens. The opening scene of a couple lying naked on a bed,
entirely content in each other's embrace, is the kind of moment you
wished lasted forever. Later we have another moment -Paul is telling
his wife that he has been having an affair- and Muntean's static
style becomes almost unbearably claustrophobic. The uncertain line
between being secure and being trapped is here as visually eloquent
as it is thematic.
 |
| Tuesday, After Christmas |
There
are plenty of new Romanian masterpieces I've not mentioned: 12:08
East of Bucharest and Police,
Adjective are wry, sharp comedies
like the best of Ealing, Beyond
the Hills re-writes the horror genre
to try our brains as well as our nerves. I could go on but I know
you're a busy man and have many undeclared expenses to whitewash. So
I'll end with this. There are of course more important things to
consider when doing politics than films and I don't expect the
existence of great cinema to neutralise the concerns of the British
public for immigration -from Romania and elsewhere- or disprove the
existence of delinquency among some migrants. But what great cinema
does do is involve us for 90 to 120 minutes in the lives of other
people. The word itself comes from the Greek Kinima,
movement; we are moved out of ourselves and sometimes, after the very
best films, we are never quite the same. The films of new
Romanian cinema that I have written about do exactly this. They
resist the unsubtle yanking of heart-strings and tear-ducts that is
stock in trade for most sentimental cinema and instead reach after
something more real. It's one of the ironies of this medium that only
the true masters of the art of creative manipulation can achieve such
a state of sheer naturalism.
See
these films and then write your scaremongering lies about Romanians.
You'll find it's more difficult to tar with the same dirty brush the
people of a nation once you have the faces of Mr Lazaescu and Otilia
staring at you. Watching these films might also open your mind a bit,
your heart a bit, your soul a bit. Ukip is of course entitled to
stand up for parochial conservatism, as questionable as this ideology
is, but the grinning smugness and Anglo-supremacist rhetoric has to
go, whether or not you see these films. If it doesn't then let me
give you a warning, via another of Mungiu's tales of the golden age,
'The Legend of the Official Visit'. Once upon a time there was a
village that was preparing for a visit from Ceaușescu.
Local party officials, keen to impress, spend vast amounts of money
and time erecting a bombastic welcome display for the visiting
delegation. The night before the big day all the officials, chuffed
with their success, get pissed and ride together on the children's
carousel. It suddenly dawns on the inebriated officials that there is
no-one around to switch off the ride and help them down. The legend
goes that they were still there, going round and round, when the
presidential motorcade passed through the village. I hope you're
enjoying the post-election ride Nigel. When the voting public sober
up come 2015 you'll still be up there going round and round.
With
un certain regard,
Romanian
Cinema*
*as
told by Gerard
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