Κατά τη διάρκεια του πολέμου στο Κόσοβο το 1999, ο σταθμάρχης του τοπικού σιδηροδρομικού σταθμού σ΄ ένα μικρό ρουμάνικο χωριό που τυχαίνει να είναι και ο τοπικός γκάνγκστερ, σταματά ένα τρένο του ΝΑΤΟ που μεταφέρει στρατιωτικό εξοπλισμό. Η μεταφορά που επιβλέπεται από αμερικανούς στρατιώτες, γίνεται σε ρουμάνικο έδαφος χωρίς επίσημα έγγραφα και βασίζεται σε μια προφορική έγκριση της ρουμάνικης κυβέρνησης. Η άφιξή τους μετατρέπει το χωριό στο χωριό των χιλίων ευκαιριών.

Η τολμηρή, συγκινητική και αστεία ταινία που βραβεύτηκε στο Φεστιβάλ Καννών το 2007.
Μια απολαυστική και αποστομωτικό σάτιρα για το Βαλκανικό αλλά και το παγκόσμιο ιστορικό γίγνεσθαι.
Το νέο Ρουμάνικο Σινεμά στα καλύτερα του.


Βραβεία

• Φεστιβάλ Καννών 2007-Μεγάλο Βραβείο,
• Ειδική μνεία στο Φεστιβάλ της Ίμπιζα 2007,
• Βραβείο Καλύτερης Ταινίας,
• Βραβείο Κοινού στο Ευρωπαϊκό Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου 2007,
• Βραβείο Καλύτερης Ταινίας,
• Βραβείο Κοινού στο Anonimul Ανεξάρτητο Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου.


CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'

Τα τελευταία χρόνια το Ρουμανικό cinema γνωρίζει πρωτόγνωρη άνθιση. Αρκεί να αναλογιστούμε τις πρωταγωνιστικές συμμετοχές που έχουν οι Ρουμανικές ταινίες σε σημαντικότατα φεστιβάλ ανά τον κόσμο. Γεγονός που μάλλον καθόλου τυχαίο δεν είναι. Δεδομένου και του κοινωνικοϊστορικού πλαισίου του τόπου της τελευταίας πεντηκονταετίας. Το οποίο στα χέρια των διψασμένων (και καταπονημένων) δημιουργών έγινε μια (κινηματογραφική) μούσα.
Και ένα απ`τα ονόματα που προκάλεσαν εντύπωση ήταν και αυτό του Cristian Nemescu. Ο οποίος απεβίωσε προσφάτως σε αυτοκινητιστικό δυστύχημα, σε ηλικία 27 ετών, χωρίς καν να προλάβει να ολοκληρώσει το μοντάζ της πρώτης του μεγάλου μήκους ταινίας. Πρόκειται για το California Dreamin`, που κυκλοφορεί σε μια endless version, και
υποσχόταν μια μεγάλη καριέρα για τον "πατέρα" του.
Αμερικάνικα στρατεύματα του ΝΑΤΟ, κατευθυνόμενα προς το Κόσοβο, θα μπλοκαριστούν σε μια μικρή επαρχιακή πόλη της Ρουμανίας. Υπαίτιος ο σταθμάρχης του χωριού (Razvan Vasilescu), που κάνει καψώνια στους επιβλητικούς (για την κοινή γνώμη) Αμερικάνους, έχοντας βιώσει ο ίδιος τραυματικά στα παιδικά του χρόνια την σαθρότητα της Αμερικάνικης (και όχι μόνο) πολιτικής. Η παραμονή του Αμερικάνικου στρατού στο χωριό υποκινεί πολυάριθμες εξευτελιστικές εξελίξεις! Απ` τον καιροσκόπο και γαλίφη δήμαρχο (Jamie Elman) που επιθυμεί, με καραβλάχικο τρόπο, να εκμεταλλευτεί την Αμερικάνικη παρουσία προς όφελος του χωριού. Διοργανώνει παραδοσιακά γλέντια και λοιπές, υποτίθεται διαφημιστικές εκδηλώσεις, για τον τόπο. Οι νεαρές, υιοθετώντας τα sexy Δυτικά πρότυπα, ορέγονται τους Αμερικάνους στρατιώτες. Είτε υποκύπτοντας στις ερωτικές ανησυχίες της ηλικίας, είτε επιθυμώντας, ματαίως, να τους χρησιμοποιήσουν ως γέφυρα για τον πηγαιμό τους στη Δύση. Και όλα αυτά, τη στιγμή που ο ενοχλημένος Αμερικάνος στρατηγός (Armand Assante) προσπαθεί να υποκινήσει αρνητικό κλίμα για τον σταθμάρχη. Ενώ οι στρατιώτες, ως γνήσια ανθρώπινα όντα, βαυκαλίζονται με τη νιρβάνα της καλοπέρασης.
Το California Dreamin` είναι μια απολαυστική, αλλά και αποστομωτική σάτιρα για το Βαλκανικό, αλλά και το παγκόσμιο ιστορικό γίγνεσθαι. Ίσως σε κάποια σημεία είναι αδικαιολόγητα μεγάλο, το μοντάζ άλλωστε δε βρίσκεται στα χέρια του δημιουργού. Ωστόσο από κάθε σκηνή ξεπηδάει μια πολύπλευρη και ξεκαρδιστική σάτιρα σε θέματα που εφάπτονται του σύγχρονου κοινωνικοϊστορικού γίγνεσθαι. Η ταινία λειτουργεί σε
ξέφρενους, σχεδόν Kusturiciκούς ρυθμούς θα λέγαμε, που ωστόσο ορισμένες φορές προδίδουν τα υπερφιλόδοξα σχέδια του δημιουργού.
Αξιοπρόσεκτη είναι η επιλογή του Cristian Nemescu να τεμαχίσει το ηλικιακό συνεχές και να χρησιμοποιήσει ήρωες που κυμαίνονται σε δυο συγκεκριμένα ηλικιακά πλαίσια. Από τη μία έχουμε την παλιά γενιά, που κρατάει ακόμα το τιμόνι των εξελίξεων και κεφαλαγεί στα τραύματα του παρελθόντος. Ενώ από την άλλη έχουμε την νεολαία.


Η οποία επιζητεί μια ιδεολογική απελευθέρωση, και έναν απεγκλωβισμό απ`το παρελθόν. Ωστόσο, αυτή η προοδευτικότητα και η ελευθερία, είναι μάλλον περισσότερο
χαλιναγωγημένη απ` ότι φαντάζεται.

Ο Cristian Nemescu χρησιμοποιώντας τη μεγάλη γενιά, έχοντας σε μεγάλη ερμηνευική φόρμα τους Razvan Vasilescu, Armand Assante, Jamie Elman, αποτυπώνει με μεγάλη ακρίβεια την σαθρότητα του πολιτικού τοπίου. Απ` την πρόσφατη αποτυχία του σοσιαλισμού. Την τραυματική εμπειρία της δικτατορίας. Εώς την παντελώς διεφθαρμένη εικόνα του σήμερα. Ένα τοπίο πολιτικής σήψης και κενότητας, ένα τοπίο ανελέητου διπλωματικού (και εμπόλεμου) καιροσκοπισμού. Ενώ από την άλλη διατυπώνει ένα παράπονο για την Ανατολή του νέου κόσμου, στον οποίο πρωταγωνιστεί η Maria Dinulescu, με τις αφίσες του Leonardo DiCaprio στο χαρούμενα χρωματισμένο δωμάτιο της. Μια νεολαία για την οποία η ονειροπόληση εξισώνεται με την διαφημισμένη ποπ κουλτούρα του Δυτικού πολιτισμού. Και είναι αυτή η νέα μέρα που περιμένουμε τόσο, και είναι αυτή η νέα μέρα τρομάζει περισσότερο... Καθώς ο αγώνας περιορίζεται στους κανόνες και στις νομοτέλειες του de facto κόσμου.

Γιώργος Ευθυμίου,
www.cine.gr


California Dreamin',
New York Times

Poor Captain Jones. An American military intelligence officer in command of a company of marines, he finds himself, in the autumn of 1999, stuck in a Romanian backwater called Capalnita. Charged with the apparently simple task of delivering some non-lethal equipment, by train, to NATO forces dealing with the situation in Kosovo, Jones stumbles into a Balkan world of bureaucratic intransigence, corruption and local feuding. A square-jawed by-the-book kind of warrior who keeps whatever sense of humor he might have on lockdown, he struggles to understand why he must spend five days languishing in a place he describes as lost “in the fold of some map.”
It may be just as surprising to find Armand Assante, who plays Jones, giving the performance of his career in a modest Romanian movie: California Dreamin' the first and only feature directed by Cristian Nemescu a phenomenally talented young filmmaker who died in a car accident shortly after completing it.
Mr. Assante, a solid, hard-working actor with scores of roles on his resume, inflects Jones’s crisp, authoritative martial gestures with hints of inner complication.
Trying to assess the delicacies of the situation on the ground in Capalnita — even as he tries to force or coax his way out — he walks a fine line between hero and clown. He may be the new sheriff in town, or else just another player in the circus passing through.
The stranding of Jones and his men could be the biggest thing ever to happen in Capalnita, and the cause of it is Doiaru (Razvan Vasilescu), the village’s bitter, semicriminal stationmaster, who lives above the depot with his daughter, Monica (Maria Dinulescu). Like most of the women in town, Monica regards the arrival of the Americans as an occasion for sexual adventure and possible escape.
At a party thrown together by the unctuous, opportunistic mayor (Ion Sapdaru), the local young men stand around looking glum while their girlfriends flirt and dance with the foreigners. Monica is drawn to Sergeant McLaren (Jamie Elman), Jones’s second in command, and though they have no language in common their first touch produces a literal electric shock. The eventual consummation of their attraction causes a blackout and several explosions.
“California Dreamin’” is a rambunctious, closely observed comedy of cultural collision, its satirical gaze aimed at Romania’s foibles and also at the sometimes lethal absurdities of geopolitics. A crucial decade younger than the other filmmakers associated with Romanian cinema’s recent renaissance, Mr. Nemescu, 26 at the time of his death, did not share their penchant for long takes and stripped-down realism. Compared with Cristi Puiu’s “Death of Mr. Lazarescu” and Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days ”(to limit the field to Cannes prize-winners by directors with nearly identical first names), “California Dreamin’” filters its local concerns through a restless pop sensibility.
Its themes are serious, but they are addressed with a playful exuberance that suggests a young man’s unbridled delight in every aspect of filmmaking, a spirit that also infuses Mr. Nemescu’s wonderful short films“C Block Story”and “Marilena From P7.” His nascent style was eclectic and sometimes chaotic, but “California Dreamin’ ” shows his ability to direct actors in two languages, and to execute set pieces — from McClaren and Monica’s intimate moments to the farce of the mayor’s big shindig — with precision and panache.
“California Dreamin’ ” is being released as it was shown in Cannes in 2007, which is to say in an unfinished (or, as the title parenthetically suggests, “endless”) state. Had he lived, Mr. Nemescu would probably have trimmed and tightened the movie, which at more than two and a half hours runs a bit long for the scope of its story. But loose-jointed though it is, it is never boring. It rambles a bit, but it always has something interesting to say.
In particular, I think, to American audiences. Given everything that has happened since, the Kosovo intervention of 1999 may not seem like a terribly relevant or significant moment in history. But viewed through the lens of the Iraq war — which was surely on Mr. Nemescu’s mind in 2006 — this odd little Clinton-era anecdote takes on some unsettling resonances.


Jones arrives, as Americans so often do, with high ideals and good intentions, greeting the people of Capalnita with a sincere respect that contains more than a hint of condescension. The villagers are mired in their own problems — a power struggle between Doiaru and the mayor and a simmering confrontation between the stationmaster and workers in a factory he wants to buy, to say nothing of the romantic agonies of the town’s young people — which the Americans can neither ignore nor solve.
The Americans, so powerful and confident, so attractive and so clueless, are regarded with ambivalence by the Romanians (including the director), whose self-image combines a sense of grievance with a certain stiff-necked pride. They live in a small country that has often found itself in the path of imperial powers, a condition they address with guile, stubbornness and a measure of grace. And lately with some pretty great movies.


California Dreamin'
by Andy Ridley, June 2008
was to be Cristian Nemescu's only feature film - both he and his sound editor were killed in a car crash before it was finished.
He has created a beautiful film. It often makes you smile because you are reminded of your own obsessions and yearnings and clumsy, frustrated attempts to better yourself. People are brought together by circumstance and we witness subtle and intimate conversations between them.
Doiaru is a corrupt station master in what he tells his daughter, Monica, is "a shit hole of a village" in Romania. He's a nobody in charge of a nowhere railway station. Monica is young and bored and wants out, so Doiaru deals in stolen goods to help her. He competes with other petty thieves and bribes the police. Is this neoliberalism, Romanian style?
As a boy, at the end of the Second World War, Doiaru had waited with his family in vain to be liberated by the US. Now the US soldiers are passing through, carrying military equipment to the border with Kosovo. The Nato bombing of Serbia is on the radio. The US wants to impose its dominance in the region. He has a chance to make a point. They have no paperwork, so he stops the train and forces them to stay.
For the mayor of the village, the US represents glamour and publicity. His wife sells cosmetics and gives lessons in seduction. For Monica and her girlfriends, between the power cuts and the prostitution, the soldiers offer a kind of escape. But now, as before, the US leaves violence and false promises in its wake. The train moves out and the town implodes.


Andrew Schenker,
about California Dreamin'

California Dreamin' is many things—a culture-clash comedy, a satire of petty-minded provincialism, a critique of American foreign involvement, and even a sliver of a love story—but in the hands of preternaturally gifted and, sadly, prematurely deceased filmmaker Cristian Nemescu, the film plays out with an impressive singularity of purpose. Set during NATO's ill-fated 1999 campaign in Kosovo, the picture begins with a joint group of American Marines and Romanian soldiers shipping a trainload of top-secret communications equipment through the Romanian countryside. Passing through the village of Capalnita, the train is stopped by the corrupt stationmaster, Doiaru (Razvan Vasilescu), who partly as a small-minded display of power and partly due to deep-seated anti-American sentiment ("Fuck U.S.A.," he declares to the Marine captain), defies Bucharest and detains the shipment for a lack of proper documentation.
During the five days the Marines remain in the village, they're courted by all sides: the opportunistic mayor stages a grand party for their benefit (a terrific comic set piece complete with Elvis impersonator and decorative paintings of such American icons as George Washington and Arnold Schwarzenegger), the high school girls throw themselves at the new crop of available young men, while other leading village interests try to finagle American dollars from the stuck soldiers. But if the presence of the Americans proves an occasion for a display of Romanian hospitality, that presence also threatens to exacerbate the underlying tensions of the village's power structure. And having brought these tensions to a head, the Marines clear out to help bomb Yugoslavia (echoing, through flashback, the Allied bombing of Romania during WWII), leaving the locals to sort out the mess and pointing up, as writer Keith Uhlich noted, "the American tendency to stir up trouble and then head for the hills" when things get out of control.
Among his countrymen, Nemescu's satirical look at the small-mindedness of provincial opportunism is far closer to the comic bluster of Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest than the pitch-black gallows humor of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, though it probably has more in common with the pointed stupidities on display in The Fireman's Ball than with either. From the characterization of the Romanian army captain (a spineless cipher of a man who pulls on his vodka bottle while his American counterpart sips water) to its view of corruption as intrinsic to the provincial mindset (our first glimpse of Doiaru shows him siphoning off supplies from a train passing through his station) to the racy entertainments that dominate the town's stages (a sexy vampire musical), Nemescu's satirical observations fruitfully echo Milos Forman's comically jaundiced worldview.

Both directors, too, view the logical endpoint of a community of venal, power-grubbing citizens as conflagration and apocalypse, though in California Dreamin' the Americans are at least partly to blame.
As the farmhouse burns to the ground in Forman's film, so our last glimpse of the town of Capalnita is of a small-scale civil war—mirroring the situation in nearby Yugoslavia—with firebombs torching police cars. But unlike in the earlier picture, in which no character is allowed to transcend their role as satirical target, Nemescu endows even his most loathsome figure, Doiaru, with a mitigating backstory to explain his particular prejudices. There's a certain nobility, as well, in his ill-fated opposition to NATO's demands, even if his motives are anything but pure. The American soldiers, for their part, are never imagined as simple-minded agents of Yankee imperialism, ranging instead from Armand Assante's ballsy but surprisingly adaptable Marine captain to Sergeant David McLaren (Jamie Elman), his more diplomatically inclined subordinate, who longs for a return to the States and takes up with a 17-year-old Romanian girl as a substitute for his woman at home. Simultaneously sympathetic and critical of his characters' myriad viewpoints (and as there are many characters in the film's broad canvas, so there are many viewpoints), Nemescu offers up a vast array of humanity caught in a specifically articulated set of circumstances and finds them acting, for the most part, out of an understandable self-interest. InCalifornia Dreamin' everyone has their reasons and, while there's no question that this may be an awful thing, it's also, thanks to the director's commitment to a fair-minded exposition, what makes them comprehensively human.