The Oak. - movie reviews

National Review, March 1, 1993 by John Simon

'IF WE have a child," says Nela to her lover, Mitica, "it will be either a genius or an idiot." "If it turns out normal," answers Mitica, "I'll strangle it with my bare hands." So ends The Oak, the movie with which the Rumanian director Lucian Pintilie may rightfully claim to be the heir apparent of those great Italian masters, Fellini and De Sica. It concerns Rumania during the last phase of the Ceausescu dictatorship, but it applies equally to any country in which a despot with a servile bureaucracy at his command holds sway. And there still are, and perhaps always will be, such countries in our hapless world.

What that exchange means is simply this: to survive intact in a totalitarjan bureaucracy, you have to be either a person of exceptional skill and intelligence or a holy simpleton. In The Oak, Mitica is a bit of a genius, and Nela a magnificent fool. Both are completely honest and fearless, and complement each other perfectly; they could have managed even if Rumania had not ridded itself of the Ceausescus. But, then, Rumania is not quite like the former Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. It is, for all the Ugric and Slavic admixtures, a Romance country, in which (to adapt Lucchino Visconti's mot about the Fascists versus the Nazis) the horror was more operettaish than operatic. But we must not forget that such an operetta is as lethal as it is comic.

In Rumania, as elsewhere, the one most in danger of becoming dehumanized by totalitarianism is indeed the "normal person," as Pintilie's film shows with a dazzling but unblinding clarity. It opens with a modern Bucharest housing development that the camera approaches during the title sequence through a wilderness of weeds and stray dogs. But inside the rundown apartment of Nela, the schoolteacher heroine, things are exponentially worse. Nela and an older man are in bed together watching home movies of a happy Christmas party for a little girl. In Nela's apartment ashtrays overflow with generations of cigarette stubs, the kitchen is a graveyard for appliances buried in alimentary debris, the bathroom looks like a promoter rather than a challenger of filth; here, as elsewhere in the movie, if water comes from the taps at all, it is the color and consistency of cocoa-- or something worse.

As for the double bed that Nela and the man occupy--the latter in some sort of stupor as he lets a crumpled Paris Match and an overturned glass of milk add to the dismalness--it is the ultimate, ineffable disaster area. Nela, disheveled, smokes ferociously as she watches the movie--projected by the whirring mechanism beside her onto a wall impinged on by Soviet airplane models--with a mixture of contempt and loathing. Who are this young woman, striking even in disarray, and that seemingly passed-out, fine-looking man? Spouses, lovers, prostitute and client? In the home movie, the little girl plucks off Santa's beard, rejects all toys but a handgun, and, transported by Santa, gleefully shoots all the party guests who collapse in sham deaths as the camera dollies after that doll-like would-be murderess. We come to realize that the man in bed is Nela's father, to whom the young woman administers a belated injection: Dad is dead.

The next events, leading up to Nela's leaving home, are among the finest examples of sardonic grotesquerie I have ever seen: a series of incidents as absurd as comic, as funny as garish. I won't spoil it for you, and will mention only Nela's subsequent confrontation with the surgeon who operated on her colonel-father, and who. now rejects the father's wish that parts of him be donated to science or needy human beings.

The grounds for refusal encapsulate a cross-section of what is wrong with economically and morally bankrupt Rumania. Eventually Nela, about to transfer to an elementary school in a provincial town, has Dad cremated. In a marvelous shot, we see the good hand of that one-armed man crumble into cinders. Collecting the ashes in a Nescafe jar, Nela proceeds to a farewell call on a lover, with the jar sometimes in a brown paper bag, sometimes exposed, giving new meaning to Jules Laforgue's verse, "Les morts, ca voyage," where, of course, the genius is in the tiny ca.

In the film, toe--with Pintilie's script based on a novel by Ion Baiescu--the genius is in the details, though the larger aspects of construction and characterization, verbal and visual narration are by no means neglected. When Nela, in a rage, demolishes her telephone and overturns her projector, the latter keeps turning, slapping its images at a drunken angle wherever they fall. So, too, the past, recent or distant, obtrudes indiscriminately, creating sardonic superimpositions, jangling paradoxes. Most appallingly, that mock holocaust wreaked by the little girl--Nela as a child will return to haunt her (and us) in the film's most shocking scene near the end. Yet even there Pintilie works a bit of comedy into the horror-legitimately, and with exquisite perception.