Review of "Sunday at Six"

Lucian Pintilie's "Sunday at Six"

One distinctive feature of Lucian Pintilie’s Duminica la ora/Sunday at Six (1965) is its use of interruptions. In the film, an oncoming train quickly silences an exchange between protagonists Radu (Dan Nutu) and Anca (Irina Petrescu), both young, militant communists engaged in a love affair threatened by Party administrators. The couple’s conversation is accordingly disciplined by Pintilie’s introduction of new sounds, new information, as the boisterous locomotive pushes into the frame, temporarily suspending the narrative.

It is these kinds of instants – of postponement, delay, interruption – that help identify Pintilie’s film as a collection of moments, each glimpsed but far too fractured to be properly remembered. How appropriate for a film that seems curious about memory, as well as the conditions memory might produce for disorientation; the film is, after all, a series of events that are fractured, forming a narrative that makes the day and hour indicated in Pintilie’s title an important anchor from which various memories and spaces are experienced. These interruptions also function to serialize actions or gestures: Pintilie interrupts a kiss between Radu and Anca by distributing it across multiple, repeating shots. Similar to memories that cannot be fully preserved or recalled, and despite however many times the act is viewed, the perspective changes. The images are indefinite. These problems – of an unreliable, interruptible memory that produces narrative ellipses – are not unique to Sunday at Six. The curators for the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s recent retrospective of Romanian cinema, "Shining Through a Long Dark Night," commend Pintilie’s debut film for having “ushered the style and look of European modernist cinema into Romania.”

Because it combines a complex narrative structure with an aesthetic that prefers naturally lit, shallowly focused black-and-white images set to an atonal score, Pintilie continues a tradition of mid-century art-house cinema devices, and makes them his own. The film accomplishes this successfully, and the results are incantatory.

Posted on 04/30/08 by: Ricky D'Ambrose 08:04 PM