The Short Films in ‘Tales from the Golden Age’ Depict Life Under Ceaușescu

It is not a little ironic that the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu (1965-89) has been drawn on so heavily for inspiration in the Romanian New Wave of cinema. Since Cristian Mungiu’s bleak, claustrophobic 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days swooped in to take the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007, Ceaușescu’s brutally destructive regime has become something of an idée fixe for the nation’s filmmakers. Even the films set in more recent times are rife with themes of corruption and the police state, from Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) to Florin Şerban’s If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle (2010).

This fascination with the near past finds a perfect expression in Tales from the Golden Age (Amintiri din epoca de aur). A series of six short films scripted by Mungiu and each helmed by a different Romanian director, it offers wry and sharply observed anecdotes. These retell various urban legends from the last decade of Ceaușescu’s reign, a so-called “golden age”, in which the country spiralled into severe poverty and isolation. More than 20 years on, the filmmakers recreate the tragedy, but more often, reveal a mordant black comedy.

The segments sketch bizarre pictures of the backwardness of every level of Romanian life. In one village, news is passed along by someone going around and banging on a drum. In the cities, the presses are stopped by the mandate to superimpose a hat on the country’s leader, employees steal food, and adolescents sit transfixed by an American movie released over a decade ago. At the same time, the society depicted in these shorts has also long since become dysfunctional and quite absurd, even comedic from a distance.

Despite this, the stories also construct a kind of sour beauty, which might seem redeeming, at least for the artists who’ve found or imposed it. The natural landscape features predominantly contrast with the village life’s squalor and remind us of how people might survive such poverty. In shots of trees and sky, we might also glimpse something like a Romanian “spirit”, and images of camaraderie or resistance to the pervasive hopelessness can be vivid.

One of the shorts, “The Legend of the Air Sellers”, celebrates the ingenuity of Romania’s teens, who exploit the nation’s growing cynicism by inventing a ruse to sell bottles for cash. Eventually, a title tells us that some saved enough to buy themselves cars. Another segment has a motley bunch of party members and unhappy village chiefs spinning helplessly on a flickering carnival ride in the middle of nowhere, a clever allusion to the directionless of political life.

Each segment offers similar commentary, as the films also set the scene for the unrest that exploded at the end of the 1980s, not just in Romania but also across Eastern Europe. In this way, Tales from the Golden Age is a more comprehensive companion piece to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, or perhaps a prequel to Corneliu Porumboiu’s 2006 film, 12:08 East of Bucharest.

The story that stands out most for its immediacy and incisiveness is “The Legend of the Greedy Policeman”. It is centred on family and the home in a way the other films are not, specifically, the Romanian tradition of eating pork for Christmas. In the 1980s, pigs were increasingly unavailable. In the thin-walled Communist apartments of an unnamed small town, the family who manages to acquire one must find a way to kill it without arousing the neighbourhood’s suspicion. The bizarre, macabre, and comic possibilities that arise from this scenario create a knife-edge sense of building tension and deliver a wickedly brilliant twist.

This short exemplifies the most compelling characteristic of Tales from the Golden Age: it lets its stories speak for themselves. Still, as retrospect imbues them with a laconic sense of humour, they might be criticised for depicting without scrutinising. They are, at most, retellings of various urban legends. Rather than setting obvious heroes against cruel and corrupt villains, they offer good-hearted, occasionally misguided souls trying to scrape by in impossible situations. There is no explanation for their predicaments; they simply are.

But their presentation in this anthology form is more powerful and insightful than an attempted sweeping critique of the country’s all-too-apparent ills. The films in Tales from the Golden Age are devoted to everyday conviction rather than forceful denouement and evoke Romanians’ experiences of this period. The directors of the Romanian New Wave continue to struggle with what it means to have suffered so long under the yoke of a dictatorial lunatic. If Tales from the Golden Age is incomplete, it is because survivors are still searching for answers and the most effective questions to ask.