by Damien Spiccia
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Revelation Perth International Film Festival
Intro:
… a stinging critique of a country in transition between Western aspiration and Eastern disorientation, filtered through the fuzzy lens of an unearthed VHS mixtape.
As the Iron Curtain lifted, and Romanians eagerly embraced the sensual glamour of Western capitalism, what replaced state propaganda on TV was often just as absurd. That absurdity frames Eight Postcards from Utopia, co-directed by Radu Jude (Bad Luck Banging) and philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz, a 70-minute assault of 1990s–2000s Romanian television commercials that offers a surreal, domestic contradiction to the festival-friendly realism of the Romanian New Wave, of which Jude is a seminal member.
Divided into the eight thematically titled ‘postcards’ (Money Talks, The Anatomy of Consumption, Masculin/ Feminin, etc), the film presents elements of Romanian life and society as filtered through heightened commercial logic, often underscored by primitive Amiga-era CGI, where Santas battle Santas and Romania’s medieval history is employed to shill Pepsi. One postcard takes us from childhood to old age (‘every second, one of us suffers a heart attack – it could be you!’). Another ruminates on millennium-era anxieties, from anti- stress tablets for the workplace, to a young man who asks, ‘why am I so sad?’ (‘because you have no friends!’). Underneath the barrage of kitsch, it’s difficult to ignore the more sinister side, which Jude and Ferencz-Flatz underline through cheeky juxtaposition or sometimes eerily discarding sound entirely.
In this more insidious Romania, seemingly benign beer commercials revere ‘Romania’s manliest men,’ who leer at women that have popped a flat on the highway (‘she gets very, very nervous’), and attempt to win millions on adult chatlines by ‘identifying the tits.’ Women are either nagging shrews or sexualized objects who cause pile-on accidents simply by uncrossing their legs, offering a glimpse of pantyhose. A military career is presented as a little boy’s desirable fantasy, and Lei rains from the skies, fetishized with a nationalistic urgency (‘get ready to be rich!’), even if itchy-palmed bribery is chastised and denounced. One hilarious sequence features extended outtakes of a hapless banker repeating the same phrase (‘we all strive to multiply your money!’), coached incessantly offscreen until the mantra becomes meaningless.
Ultimately, whether you find Eight Postcards from Utopia exhilarating or exhausting depends on your tolerance for ephemera, sensory overload, and a deliberate lack of a clear emotional throughline. And while the final chapter on abstract environmentalism ends things with a whimper, in contrast to the rollicking energy built up in the preceding segments, the cumulative effect is undeniable: a stinging critique of a country in transition between Western aspiration and Eastern disorientation, filtered through the fuzzy lens of an unearthed VHS mixtape.
