Noaptea Ursului is Romania’s unnecessary, unintelligible answer to Richard Linklater’s Suburbia. Like Linklater, writer/director Paul-Razvan Macovei repurposed Waiting for Godot. The key difference is that Linklater took the despair of Beckett’s play and topped it: “His heroes aren’t waiting as a mission, but as a lifestyle.” Macovei’s characters, on the other hand, have no style.
Suburbia is about young people who have bored themselves to (spiritual) death and would like to bore their friends to tears, and yet they’re not boring to the audience; like David Thewlis in Mike Leigh’s Naked, they can be downright nasty, but they’re not dumb. Linklater endowed them with intelligence and a sense of humor, and you get the feeling that they could make something of their lives if they really wanted to — and some of them want to, and do.
Noaptea has a more optimistic conclusion than Suburbia, but getting there is a brutal chore that seems a few eternities longer than the movie’s 77-minute runtime. There’s a lot of talking in Suburbia, and a lot of quarreling (“Jeff likes to argue for the sake of arguing” is one line that, for whatever reason, has stuck with me through the years), all of it blessed with writer Eric Bogosian’s keen ear for dialogue.
Eric (Gabriel Huian), Anghel (Alexandru Voicu), and Geo (Blad Valan), conversely, do nothing but bicker. They bicker for the sake of bickering, but (with one exception I’ll get to below) they say nothing memorable, amusing, or moving.
Arguably worse than the bickering, they all keep breaking the fourth wall. Some films, like Chinese Coffee or Linklater’s Tape, are so intimate and immediate that they betray their origins as stage plays; others, such as Noaptea, have ambitions of a faux theatrical provenance, so they simply have their characters address an invisible audience. The result is not quite the same.
For all I know, this movie may have seen the light of day as a stage production; it certainly has the minimalist cast and economy of sets to be one. That might also explain the overreliance on flashbacks in lieu of action.
Actually, the flashbacks could have been the highlight of the film. They are narrated by the characters over animated segments. The animation is unsophisticated, but that suits Macovei’s DIY approach.
It is through these asides that we learn the most about the heroes’ domestic lives, such as Geo’s Oedipus complex. This of course means that the juiciest stuff, dramatically speaking, is confined to animated flashbacks.
I understand that that was a cost-cutting measure (saving on actors with speaking parts, among other things), but Macovei could have incorporated the flashbacks into a linear, forward-moving narrative, while still retaining the live action/animation hybrid.
Like when Anghel walks in on his father and sister having incestuous relations, although that’s technically a flashback too, even if it goes back only a couple of minutes. Moreover, it comes out of nowhere, with little or no buildup.
It’s almost like it’s there merely as a segue to the next scene. If I wanted a movie that deals with father-daughter incest, I’d rewatch Tim Roth’s The War Zone, which is not only about that subject but unflinchingly so.
(The whole thing does lead to the film’s only funny moment. Geo is freaking out — asking Anghel, “what’s wrong with your sister?” Kind of hypocritical for a guy who had earlier admitted to jerking off to his own mom —, while Eric is trying to convince Anghel that his dad was probably banging a prostitute and Anghel got confused. “It was a whore,” Eric keeps repeating, causing Geo to chime in: “It was. His sister is the whore.”)
The biggest problem, however, with the animated vignettes is that the protagonists and their relatives are represented by anthropomorphic teddy bears (and sometimes bunnies), even before the trio rescue an oversized, threadbare teddy bear from the thrash (a clumsy symbol for these teens’ ‘brokenness’). This choice is the last nail in the movie’s coffin, denying the screenplay what little urgency it could have ever hoped to gather.
To make a dumb story short, Anghel commits suicide by Chinese store owner (offscreen), and Geo’s and Eric’s problems are magically solved (also offscreen), and the two are now the best of friends — never mind that their favorite thing to say directly to the camera (Anghel’s too) is “I don’t know why I hang out with these two” or a variation thereof.
Long before it’s all over, we know exactly how they feel, and are wondering the same thing ourselves. All things considered, it’s a clear-cut case of misery loving company. Surely Anghel, Geo, and Eric tolerate one another because no one else would put up with them; the question is, why should we?
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