An Unforgettable Summer. - movie reviews

National Review, Dec 19, 1994 by John Simon

LUCIAN Pintilie, who stunned us with The Oak, has done it again with An Unforgettable Summer. The title was imposed on him; he wanted The Salad, after the name of part one of the autobiography of a Rumanian army captain, Petre Dumitriu, on which the film is based. This focuses on an incident in the officer's life in 1925, when he was transferred to a border outpost in the Dobroudja by his superior, General (and Prince) Ipsilanti, who vainly lusted after Petre's beautiful wife, the half-Hungarian Marie-Therese. Nationalities and their languages are very important here: when the babble of tongues and dialects rises to Babelic heights, bloodshed ensues. Particularly in the Balkans.

The film quickly establishes the ethnic-linguistic cauldron threatening to boil over. Because a grand ball is about to take place nearby, a brothel must be temporarily closed and shuttered. The official bearing the edict is roundly abused with colorful (but anachronistic) Hungarian expletives by the liveliest of the whores, Erzsi, a Magyar. Later, from her window, the girl moons the army dignitaries arriving for the ball; they stare up in mixed horror and admiration at the familiar globe whose owner they promptly identify. When Ipsilanti sends a couple of junior officers to beat up the girl, she hurls at them the slogans of Bela Kun, the deposed Hungarian Communist leader.

At the ball, Ipsilanti dances with the longed-for Marie-Therese, while her jealous bantam-sized husband fumes, smokes, and wins at cards. Conversation is in mixed Rumanian and French, as we learn that Marie-Therese is the daughter of a member of the aristocratic Lascari family who married a noble Hungarian, which the Rumanians consider declasse. Because the young woman is played by the spirited British actress Kristin Scott-Thomas, Mr. Pintilie, as his own screenwriter, invents a further background for her in England: "She speaks perfect Rumanian with an Oxford accent." This may overcomplicate matters, but it fits in, as we hear her frequently speak English, in the aforementioned Babel.

Ipsilanti posts Dumitriu to the godforsaken Dobroudja, a territory claimed by Bulgaria and infested with Comitadji, Macedonian rebels (or bandits, depending on your point of view) who keep raiding and killing whoever is in power, and slicing off the lips of the dead to feed them to their hogs. This is the fate that befell Captain Dumitriu's predecessor, and the general evidently hopes that it may befall the captain, so that Marie-Therese will fall to him. Or else that she will be so bored with their wretched surroundings as to become eager for some extramarital sport.

But Marie-Therese finds the primitive surroundings and pristine landscape, over which flocks of birds keep whirring and swooping, very much to her liking, and loves the stark mountain that dominates it. It looks, as she notes, like Fujiyama; only nicer than the prototype. And her three small children and the family setter have fun whipping around the camp and its sandy environs. The light on Fujiyama, as photographed by Calin Ghibu, is indeed of an almost unearthly beauty at sunset, and there are many shots of Petre's monocled, somewhat comic face and his wife's finely chiseled one laved by that otherworldly light as they take on the aspect of naive icons against the bare, white-gleaming walls of their abode.

The captain, trained in Germany, is a good fellow but a stickler for discipline. Marie-Therese is fun-loving, intelligent (she reads Proust in French--not bad for Dobroudja in 1925), and sensitive. None of this is appreciated by the two boorish lieutenants under the captain (one of them the very fellow who roughed up Erzsi), or even by the common soldiers, to whom a seemingly flighty young beauty, gamboling children, and a befuddled nanny are an incomprehensible sight, and even the lady's intercession for them when maltreated by their lieutenants must seem somehow out of order.

There are disturbing omens. An elaborate Venetian pier glass on the wall is suddenly pierced by a projectile from without. A mischievous pebble, the Dumitrius assume; later, looking behind the mirror, they'll find a bullet in the wall. The tomatoes and lettuce for their salad, growing in sandy soil, prove unpalatable. Ten Bulgarian hostages become their slave gardeners, and the vegetables markedly improve. But the good gardeners are to be executed in retaliation for the latest Comitadji raid. This despite their innocence, and Marie-There's having befriended them to the point where she pays them out of her own pocket. When General Ipsilanti and his staff officers come to lunch, the salad is irresistible. Not so Marie-Therese's pro-Bulgarian remarks, which have the prince in a barely controlled rage.

But he did not come for the salad; rather, to reissue the oral orders Captain Dumitriu has thus far disregarded: that the Bulgarian hostages be shot. In various brilliant exchanges, the absurdity of Balkan politics becomes manifest. The Comitadji aren't even Bulgarian, and these Bulgarians, in any case, are harmless peasants, not even allowed to talk to their anxious wives who hover nearby. One of the hostages is, in fact, a Turk, who does not speak any Bulgarian. And there are no written orders for the execution, for obvious reasons; but Dumitriu, out of respect for military discipline (and perhaps love for his wife) insists on them, defying both his superiors' promises of preferment and their threats of nonpromotion.