Review movies: Pick of the Indies | Tales from the Golden Age | Romania | Nicolae Ceausescu’s hated regime

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 29 October 2009

Pick of the Indies

TALES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE
Directed by Cristian Mungiu, Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Höffer, Constantin Popescu
Certificate: 12a

THE myths propagated by Romania’s Communist dictatorship in the decade leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Nicolae Ceausescu’s hated regime were so deeply ingrained in the minds of the people living cowed under state terror that it was officially known as the country’s “golden age”.
Tales from the Golden Age is a surprising collection of five stories that recounts some of the odder, more bizarre, often wonderful and almost always tragic and funny urban myths that were carved from the everyday events of life under the Ceausescu regime.
We learn that when Ceausescu was due to visit the countryside, villagers would be ordered to hang fruit from trees to demonstrate the plentiful bounty his benign rule created.
In one of the stories, we watch the frantic attempts by the village of Vizuresti to get themselves ready for an official visit, like a teenager tidying up their bedroom to earn pocket money.
Another tells of the time when Ceaucesecu was photographed standing next to the French Premier. The French PM is wearing his hat in each photograph, while Ceausescu isn’t: cue frantic discussions among newsmen as to whether to airbursh out the French hat or add one to Ceausescu’s head – to be seen without a hat in front of a capitalist pig may be read as the working classes being unduly deferential to the West.
Then there is a tale about a driver who opens a sealed chicken truck to discover what lies inside – and the repercussions of his behaviour – and another about a policeman who gets given a pig for Christmas and decides to gas it to death rather than risk his starving neighbours hearing its death squeals.
The directors say it was humour that helped get them through these days.
They chose several true stories and they have managed to scoop up that sense of absurdity and stick it onto the screen in this enlightening and deliciously odd take on life in eastern Europe just two decades ago.

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