Review of 12:08 East of Bucharest

The Event That Never Was: Corneliu Porumboiu's "12:08 East of Bucharest"

The Romanian title of Porumboiu’s 2006 film is A fost sau n-a fost, or Was There or Wasn’t There? “There” refers to Romania’s December 1989 revolution – or “revolution,” depending on who’s being asked – a topic discussed in the space of a local television broadcast featuring two pitiable middle-aged men, each claiming involvement in the overthrow of the Ceausescu government.

However playful and absurd, Porumboiu uses this broadcast to provoke all kinds of questions (about the legitimacy of certain kinds of political assumptions, about the effects of media on the ways we form opinions and manage information). Porumboiu finds ways to cope with these questions; comedy becomes the method to address them, but never a means to resolve them, to make them orderly. The film shares with Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazerescu and Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days – two other award-winning films often cited in discussion of the so-called Romanian New Wave - a sensitivity toward surface information, and a proclivity for resisting psychological explanations or descriptions of events.

The early images of Porumboiu’s film testify to a heightened interest in the most mundane and trivial of tasks, as both Emanoil (Mircea Andreescu) and Virgil (Teodor Corban) are presented as characters who sift through their everyday experiences without a great deal of stamina or interest. This kind of presentation – one that makes on-screen events equivalent in their lack of any substantial narrative power or hierarchy – makes the televised dispute that follows seem equally commonplace, trivial; Porumboiu transforms the space of the television studio into something inhospitable to provocative debate. Because of this, we are left with information about characters and events that are not burdened by any kind of instructions, resisting facile or comfortable explanations.

Given these guidelines, one way of thinking about 12:08 East of Bucharest, or of coping with it, is via its opening and closing images. In the opening: the streetlights in the small village of Porumboiu’s film are gradually turned off. The closing: these lights are illuminated again, as are others throughout the town. The film’s most intrepid, most powerful gesture is this moment of re-illumination, this non-event within a film structured by non-events. To illuminate is also to partake in affirmation (one parallel here is to the lighting of votive candles in the Christian church, an act that connotes a kind of spiritual pledge or obligation).

As Porumboiu’s film is preoccupied with problems that cannot be resolved – with situations and moments that prove insubstantial or absurd – his closing images are hardly affirmative. They are images of loss instead.

Posted on 04/30/08 by: Ricky D'Ambrose 07:38 PM