Cristi Puiu's SIERANEVADA is nominally a comedy. Centered around a family gathering just a few weeks after the death of its patriarch, the Romanian film explores themes ranging from family infighting to conspiracy theories. It's three hours long (too long, in fact), comprised of very long takes on a tripod, and contains no non-diegetic score. I say "nominally a comedy" because nobody in the theatre was laughing. Except for me, because I loved the film.
Let me explain. My mother is from Bucharest, and Puiu's film captures every family gathering I've been to in an almost uncomfortably high level of accuracy. I've met all the people in the film, and the weirdness of Romanian culture is the joke in and of itself, so it didn't surprise me that when an aunt and niece are arguing over the merits of Ceausescu's communism, leading the daughter to tears over her aunt's complicity in the brutal abuse of citizenry, that I was the only one in the audience laughing (I saw the film in Madrid's Cine Golem). These conversations heard in every Romanian household are held up to the light for what they are: utterly ridiculous and inane.
If you're foreign, you may not pick up on that and might actually be shocked by the darkness these conversations lead into. But from what I've gathered in my family, the only way to react against the suffering the country has undergone the past few centuries is with bleak distance and absurdist humor. Much like Puiu's THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (which, if you're going to see a Romanian film, you should see), it's hilarious to Romanians and horrifying to everyone else.
Considering that AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY or FENCES were criticized for feeling like stage plays simply transcribed to the screen, SIERANEVADA risks being judged similarly, perhaps even more brutally, considering the camerawork isn't fancy or as cinematic as Puiu's colleagues in the Romanian New Wave. While its camerawork risks boring the tears out of the average viewer (the guy next to me fell asleep), it has a purpose. By only moving the camera via a tripod (and the camera does move in every single shot), it recreates the feeling of actually being in the scene and at least gave me a dizzying shot of deja vu.
I'm reminded of one brilliantly choreographed shot where the camera looks at a man engrossed in a YouTube conspiracy video (the film takes place the same week of the Charlie Hebdo attacks) then pans to the protagonist who is conversing with a family member in the bedroom. The camera pans back to the man watching the YouTube video, but before it can reach the man, it jerks back to the protagonist as he leaves the bedroom. Family gatherings are a lot like this: we focus on the most interesting members at any given point. It's not like a stage play where everyone in the ensemble has specific show-stealing scenes and everything is tied up in a nice bow at the end. SIERANEVADA jumps around to whatever is most interesting. Could it have been shaved by an hour? Probably, but that's not to say that within this film there isn't a masterpiece.
