Nr. 3 (24) anul VII / iulie-septembrie 2009 - ROMDIDAC

EX PONTO NR.3, 2009
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other, it allowed doctors to treat patients discretionarily, since the objective
reality was a good enough excuse anyway. On the list of credits, there are
big names from the medical profession who fight the system to change it
radically: Sorin Oprescu, the current director of the Municipal Hospital, is the
most important of them. He chose to become a politician simply to get access
to power and money to modernize the hospital and he succeeded. He became
a model for renowned surgeons, neurologists, and obstetricians, all of whom
entered politics to be able to finance their home institutions. Their names are
also among the credits. This detail may support the interpretation of the film
as a critique of the Romanian system which still needs political reinforcement
for any step, no matter how vital it may be.
The documentary aspect with its implicit irony serves Puiu’s critique very
well. He did not look for the topic of his mock documentary too far; he looked
around and found the “savages” nearby, “savages” about whom Grierson
talked to Robert Flaherty. Grierson related his conversation with Flaherty about
“exoticism” as the crucial element of a documentary in his diary:
‘Beware the ends of the earth and the exotic: the drama is on your doorstep
wherever the slums; are, wherever there is malnutrition, wherever there
is exploitation and cruelty. You keep your savages in the far place Bob;
we are going after the savages of Birmingham,’ I think I said to him pretty
early on. And we did.
It seems that Puiu took Grierson’s advice literally and he went after the
“savages” of Bucharest in the least expected place, the hospitals.
In the good Romanian cultural tradition according to which “nobody is
a prophet in his own country,” meaning that someone must be acclaimed
internationally first and then someone may expect the recognition of his
fellow-citizens, Puiu, as well as Mungiu, had to make the headlines in the
European and American media as prize winner. They had to appeal to the
international market, and finally they drew the Romanians’ attention. Thus,
Romanians themselves buy what these directors have sold the Western market
as Romanian identity. In their turn, Romanians, even those who learned about
communism from history books and their parents’ memories, reconsider their
perspective on Romanian identity, comparing the Romanianness presented
in these docudrama like movies with the cultural models taught in schools
and universities. Due to the realistic reconstruction of the communist era and
the authenticity of contemporary Romania in these movies, Romanian public
prefer to identify with the images from the movies and not with historical
and cultural clichés. The fact that the foreign film critics have emphasized
“exoticism” as one of the features of Romanian identity does not seem to
bother the Romanian public at all; on the contrary, they have started to put the
communist past behind them while judging it more critically, on the one hand,
and at the same time to become more critical of the current context.
The communist past and its remains become the main identity features
of Romanianness, even if they present an incomplete portrait of Romanian
identity, that portrait which is already sketched by the others, which meets the
others’ stereotypes about Romania and plays with them. After the “success”
of the life broadcast of Romanian revolution from December 1989 and the first
documentaries about Romania which promoted exclusively the most degrading
aspects of Romanian communism, Romanian filmmakers understood that the
everyday life misery during the communism or as a consequence of that era