Principles of Life (Principii de viata) – Romanian Film Festival, NYC Movie Review

By Ron Wilkinson Dec 16, 2011, 22:39 GMT

“Father Knows Best,” Romanian style, forges ahead with low-key humor.

Romanian national film favorite Vlad Ivanov (“Four Months, Three weeks, Two Days” and “Police Adjective”) performs a commendable one-man show as husband and father, Emilian. Emilian runs a successful printing business, is having a house built for his family and shows a remarkable talent for managing people.

He extricates himself from a complaining customer, untwists a couple of knots in his house project, knocks off a few more minor miracles and heads for the home stretch.

Even so, trouble is brewing. As adept as he is at managing the slings and arrows of the outside world, home is where the trouble starts. He is nearly defenseless at the hands of his slacker son and marginally supportive wife.

Continuing a pattern that has become a trademark of Romanian Film Festival movies, Emilian does little that would be considered interesting in the context of most world cinema. The good news is that he is amazingly real. When he tours the construction of his new house, the soundtrack switches to howling drill bits and a banging and clanging that would do justice to an inebriated Gypsy tinker.

The film is saturated with authenticity, but drill bit howling, banging and clanging, and slacker teenagers do not add up to a mesmerizing film. Low-key humor is the goal here; that subtle, understated message that combines the best Bohemian virtues with the slowest of country lifestyles. The result is a degree of realism that has many in the audience sleeping their way through the last half of the film.

The audience wants to know where this film is going; at least those who have no Romanian films under their belts. In time, the experienced viewer understands that it will not get any more exciting. There were undoubtedly more exciting films In the New York Romanian Film Festival, films showcasing fast action and tense, thrilling climaxes.

However, after seeing a few more films similar to “Principle of Life,” experienced RFF fans might lobby for another MPAA rating to warn potential viewers away from a very slow movie.

In fairness, there is a bit of action at the end of the film; a climax, of sorts, when Emilian finally cuts the mooring lines to his nine-to-five life and mounts the highway in search of vacation. We wish him well, but suspect there has to be something more as the final credits roll across the screen. There is nothing more.

The supporting role of Catalin, played by newcomer Gabriel Huian, is one of the high points of the film. The teenager seems so perfectly bent on driving his father to homicide that it is hard to suppress a smile. Huian appears to be suppressing a smile when his father cuffs him for the two-dozenth time or yells some creative expletive at him, in an attempt to get the boy to get with the vacation program.

When the two go shopping at the supermarket for “fun” things to use on their vacation, the debate over the flippers is bittersweet. It is hard to tell if we are laughing because it is funny, or because we feel we should laugh at something. After all, it is a comedy.

Are the flippers a nod to Dustin Hoffman duded up in his graduation present in “The Graduate?” Such humor may be too good to be true, although there are some parallels.

The pacing is about the same as the Romanian satire of life and death, “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” except that at the end of this film Emilian succeeds in vacation. Of course, Mr. Lazarescue succeeds, too, in a way.

Unfortunately, that is as good as it gets. The rest of the film is impeccably faithful shooting using natural light, natural sets, natural sound, and, yes, natural costumes. The clothes on the set appear to be faithful reproductions of the cloths the actors wore mowing the lawn the previous weekend; in fact, they appear to be the identical clothes the actors wore.

Typical comments from the crowd range from “What did I just see?” to “No, I don’t know, I fell asleep in the middle…” The Romanian film industry needs to perk it up a bit. So much for the beautiful purity of the everyday. We want to see something different.

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Directed by: Constantin Popescu
Written by: Razvan Radulescu, Alexandru Baciu
Starring: Vlad Ivanov, Gabriel Huian and Rodica Lazar
Release Date: None---Romanian Film Festival, NYC
MPAA: Not Rated
Running Time: 95 minutes
Country: Romania
Language: Romanian with English Subtitles
Color: Color