Police vs. Tales

The Romania project is ramping up again, with some forthcoming screenings scheduled, the heat is on to finish it up. This is part of the reason I am interested in anything Romanian that screens in New York.

A few weeks ago I saw Police, Adjective at IFC and this last weekend Tales from the Golden Age at the Walter Reade. I enjoyed both quite a bit, even though they were very different movies.

Police, Adjective is extremely slow, about the pacing of a police stakeout appropriately, with the bleak blue-gray palate of a cloudy day. And yet, is also bizarrely, I guess anthropologically engaging as you observe this small, mundane and obscure world revealed.

Tales on the other hand is vibrantly colorful, with two of the legends set in a rustic countryside, and the stories are hilariously absurd. They are somehow light and playful, even with the backdrop of fear and desperation that drives these bizarre situations.

It’s interesting to contrast these two movies, as Police, with it’s sober reality, is set in contemporary Romania, while the colorful Tales, set in the 1980s, looks at the final decade of the dictatorship. While I recognized much of the attitude I observed in Police, Tales was certainly familiar for the local landmarks, like the House of the Free Press, and the huge block apartment buildings, which still look the same as they did in the ‘80s.

Someone asked me this weekend, “So is your documentary colorful or dark?” And I didn’t quite have an answer.