Carnival Scenes (De Ce Trag Clopotele, Mitică?)

CARNIVAL SCENES (De Ce Trag Clopotele, Mitică?)          B                   

aka:  Why Are the Bells Ringing, Mitică?

Romania (132 mi)  1979  d:  Lucian Pintilie

Lucian Pintilie is a Romanian-born director whose career began in Bucharest in the 50’s, graduating from the Bucharest Drama and Cinema Art Institute in 1965, when he began working in Romanian Television, but was released for “lack of talent.”  In 1958 he staged at different Bucharest theaters Max Frisch’s The Firebugs, Gorky’s Children of the Sun, Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and Caragiale’s Carnival Scenes.  With this last one, staged in 1969 in Paris at the National Theater, he became internationally known.  In 1965, he directed his debut film, SUNDAY AT SIX (1965), a film that so upset Romanian censors that he could not make his second film REENACTMENT (1969) until four years later.  Although it was initially banned, REENACTMENT had its international premiere at Cannes in 1970 and the filmmaker was lauded in absentia, while today it is considered a seminal work of the New Romanian Cinema.  Forced into exile, Pintilie fled the Ceausescu regime in 1972 for Paris and had to shoot his third film WAR NO. 6 (1973) in Yugoslavia.  He returned home to make his fourth, CARNIVAL SCENES (1979), but when that film was also banned for the entire decade of the 80’s due to its strong subversive content, he left Romania for France.  Throughout his work he has explored questions of tyranny and remorse—often relating directly or allegorically to the history of his own country.  For twenty years he lived and worked in France and the United States, directing plays, television films and operas.  He served as artistic director of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and of the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.  In 1990, after the collapse of Communism and the advent of democracy in Romania, Pintilie returned to filmmaking creating a series of no-holds-barred dramas and dark comedies about life and its absurdities.  Virtually unknown in the U.S., Pintilie has observed about his own work, “What is the survival strategy of a community in a state of perpetual catastrophe?... And when does making fun—the assumed irresponsibility, the dark humor that we, Romanians, are so proud of—stop being an impenetrable shield?  This is the number one matter in all my movies.”

Based on a darkly absurdist play by Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912), that is interestingly framed at beginning and end by the filming on a movie set, literally a killer beginning and ending, where in between it turns into a deliriously ribald farce, an overblown, frenetically paced, madcap comedy that is so completely over-the-top in maniacal energy that only films of Emir Kusterica match this kind of former Eastern bloc Balkan intensity.  The orgiastic wildness has such a sarcastically mocking tone of absurdity, but also an inherently bleak nature, where the setting is a tiny settlement on the edge of “civilization,” where many structures remain in an incomplete state of construction.  These makeshift buildings sit alongside an almost empty, garbage-filled lake, suggesting all are part of a toxic existence.  The film is full of nasty and vulgar characters that intentionally lie and deceive one another, often taking on assumed roles in order to carry out their deceit, where the central character, Gheorge Dinica as Nae Girimea, is a barber and the town lothario who continually eludes Pampon (Victor Rebengiuc), who ends up hopelessly searching for him throughout the entire movie, discovering early on that the man has been sleeping with his own kept woman, Didina (Tora Vasilescu), believing all along that Mitica (Stefan Iordache) is the conniving culprit.  The story turns into a free-for all of mistaken identities, where Nae continues to elude what’s coming to him by playing a kind of Pagliacci character, a clownish rake who cowardly and deviously slips into various disguises.  The real comic talent is displayed by Miriana Mihut as Mita, the Rubenesque and bosomy woman who thought she had Nae all to herself (while belonging to Mitica), who continually reveals her furious discontent by swinging an axe around.  This shocking portrait of whiners, backstabbers, gossipers, and all around general lowlifes fill the screen with their screaming mania, as characters rarely talk, instead they shout, each one louder than the next, often all at the same time in a display of utter buffoonery. 

While the dialog is non-stop and can get overwhelming after awhile, the comic timing of the actors couldn’t be more in synch, where the performances, as well as the endless delirium onscreen, is unlike the stripped-down realism of Romanian films today, as it’s a unique example of unstoppable anarchy, which under an overly controlled, totalitarian Soviet system must have felt like the supreme liberation.  The sexual betrayal unearthed in the opening few minutes of the film drives the entire action, as Pampon has the ferocity of a Russian Cossack, always in attack mode, where he has to decipher who the conniver is in a Turkish bath filled with naked men, any one of whom could be who he’s looking for, eventually settling for Mitica, who’s paralyzed with humiliation to discover his wife is deceiving him, all too willing to accept punishment meant for someone else, as Pampon and Mitica are both deceived by the same man.  The search for the backstabbing womanizer reaches epic proportions at an extended costume ball where everyone is disguised, where Nae continually changes costumes to keep away from trouble, where out of nowhere Didina breaks out into a French Cancan, leading the audience in a rousing version of La Marsellaise La Marseillaise YouTube (3:08) followed by The Internationale THE INTERNATIONALE (in Russian) YouTube (3:51).  This carnival party sequence couldn’t be more outlandishly liberated, as the no-holds-barred revelers are scandalously inebriated, where any sense of balance has been lost, all leading to what has to be the most infamous dog scene in the history of film, where two poodles walk exclusively on their hind legs wearing army hats, one with a gun in its mouth, where the narrator describes them as “Romanian trained dogs, as they go back into their cages on their own afterwards,” before getting carried away with dog theatrics, recreating a Turkish massacre taking place on what resembles a puppet show set, where in their state of aroused frenzy, the audience starts beating another dog, leaving it lying outside as a corpse, where one performing dog, still on his hind legs, stops to examine his fallen comrade, as the other looks forlornly out the window, while the crowd of spectators wanders away and disperses into the bowels of the backwater town, disappearing into the movie set of smoke and fog, to the suddenly disquieting music of Mozart’s Requiem Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Requiem K. 626 YouTube (53:28).