Overrated movie, in my opinion
I have watched it on HBO, last night, and I find it very hard to go through without throwing the remote through the screen... Fortunately, I value my TV more so that remained only an intention.
Obviously, I'm Romanian. And as such, I should be more lenient towards the movie, but I cannot overlook some obvious shortcomings.
Firstly, the artistic choice of shooting the entire movie in a hand-held camera style. It is extremely tedious and tiresome to watch and sometimes during the screening I really wished I have captured the movie and pass it through an anti-shaking filter to stabilize the image. I can understand the documentary feel it gives, but I think enough clues for the documentary feeling were included in the storyboard to be necessary that the idea to be hammered on so heavily.
Second, I disagree with some of the reviewers that says the acting was good. There was, in my opinion, a wide variation of acting talent in this movie. Surely, the main character, Cornelia, is well acted; the short scene with the witness is well played and almost well filmed. But Barbu was one-dimensional and lifeless. Most of the time, I couldn't tell the difference if the actor would have been replaced with a cardboard cutout of him. Most reaction we got from him was at the end, when he finally tries to shake up his mother's influence off his shoulders and even then his acting was quite bad. And what about the father? Florin Zamfirescu is a great actor, if only a bit limited on the range, but here he's subdued, actually feels like telegraphing his lines. I don't know, maybe I expect something different from a stage actor as well experienced as he is.
Third, editing. Good in some places, but awful in parts. A particularly bad moment occurred in the kitchen of the Barbu's home, during the scene where the mother is looking around the previously forbidden apartment. The cut seemed so rough to me, it reminded me to the old days of watching movies in the old theaters of my childhood, during the communist years, with copies several generations over and full of rough repairs of broken film.
Fourth, and that seems to me to be the main fault of the movie, the lack of implication that the director seems to have about the morals of the story. I usually expect to find this kind of unbiased storytelling on documentaries or news, not on movies. Movies have the right to push specific concepts and opinions. News, not so much. But in Romania, the objective and unbiased view comes from movies such as this one, and not from the news (extremely fixated on forming opinions instead of relating the events as objectively they can).
The movie sins by having no opinion about the absolutely revolting way the family begins to protect the obviously guilty driver that killed a mostly innocent kid. Moreover, after missing the opportunity of shunning the immoral behavior and actions of Cornelia, the fact is regarded almost as normal in the reminder of the movie, and this seems to become the normal situation in which the movie goes on with the subject of poor rich boy that's so traumatized not by lack of money and resources to live a decent life, but by the fact that his mother is smothering him with her incessant nagging. And the movie doesn't give plausible backing for this claim: what we see is a normal reaction from a voluntary mother set on defending her child with everything is in her power. I bet everybody had the same kind of behavior from their mother at some moment in life. Anyway, I couldn't shake the feeling, after the abrupt end of the movie, when at least the mother and son seemed to go back to more human and normal feelings of guilt, that they will drive on, abandoning the drama of the last scene, and talking about the small things as if nothing important has happened. I wouldn't have been surprised at all if that had happened, considering the indifference of the first part of the movie over the fact that the actions of the mother were despicably immoral.
Overall, probably it's a good movie, since it provokes such strong reactions, but... I don't know, maybe I'm used to some consistency, or clearer conclusions from movies... but this one did anything wrong to make me say "good movie" at the end.
I'm curious if anyone else feels the way I feel.