Review of Tales from the Golden Age (2009) by Mike M — 20 Oct 2009

We watch history being replayed, and reclaimed, as the absurdist farce it perhaps always was. It strikes me as no great surprise these new Romanian films have found the foothold they have in the UK, so close are they in their comic register to our own Ealing comedies: as in 2007's "12:08 East of Bucharest" and last year's excellent "California Dreamin'", we're amused by the sight of petty, parochially-minded bureaucracy having rings run round it by plucky, spirited little guys.

.. The risk is that the viewer might miss the irony intended by the title, and conclude life under Ceaucescu wasn't so bad after all: sure, this Romania seems a little disorganised, is evidently a stranger to interior design, and appears overly reliant on concrete as a construction tool, but individual mistakes and even acts of criminality don't necessarily lead here to anything other than something to tell the grandchildren.

Mungiu and his co-directors do, however, find plenty of images that somehow speak for the whole: a merry-go-round that can't be shut down because the operator's enjoying the ride himself; a hard-faced Party committee getting in a terrible tangle over the name Valery Giscard d'Estaing; a pig roaming a living room.

For a portmanteau, the quality control's pretty good, too: individual episodes range from the very sharp to the merely watchable. If the fowl-play travails of "Legend of the Chicken Driver" seem to have lost something in translation, even that can be reinterpreted as "Whisky Galore!" with eggs.