Aferim!

Product Description Eastern Europe, 1835. Two riders cross a barren landscape in the middle of Wallachia. They are the gendarme Costandin and his son. Together they are searching for a gypsy slave who has run away from his nobleman master and is suspected of having an affair with the noble's wife. While the unflappable Costandin comments on every situation with a cheery aphorism, his son takes a more contemplative view of the world. On their odyssey they encounter people of different nationalities and beliefs: Turks and Russians, Christians and Jews, Romanians and Hungarians. Each harbors prejudices against the others which have been passed down from generation to generation. And even when the slave Carfin is found, the adventure is far from over... Radu Jude's third feature has been aptly compared to films as diverse as THE SEARCHERS, THE LAST DETAIL and PULP FICTION (the latter for its rambling, coarse and endlessly entertaining dialogues), but the film is ultimately a moving parable about late-feudal Europe developed from historical documents and songs: its power structures and hierarchies, people's ideas of themselves and others, interaction with minorities and the resulting conflicts. A Balkan Western in black-and-white that brings the cacophony of the times strikingly to life and explores the thematic arcs that stretch into the present. Jude, whose previous feature films (THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD and EVERYBODY IN OUR FAMILY) received accolades at numerous festivals in Europe and the US, is also known for a string of prize-winning short films, including THE TUBE WITH A HAT (2006), which took the top prize at Sundance and 15 other awards at festivals around the world. AFERIM! was produced by Ada Solomon's Hi Film, which also produced Golden Bear winner CHILD'S POSE (2013). Review Do you need another reason to be mad about the Oscar nominations? Well here's one, expressed as tradition demands in the form of a hashtag: #WhataboutAferim! Aferim!--the title translates more or less as Attaboy!--is Radu Jude's sublime new feature, a funny and brutal costume drama with a potent contemporary kick. Officially submitted for consideration as Romania's official entry in the best foreign-language film sweepstakes, it was omitted from the final list of five nominees. A shocking slight, but maybe not all that surprising. Romania, a small country on the fringe of Europe, has a long history of being trampled, disrespected and ignored by the world's great powers. Why should Hollywood be an exception? Marginality is part of the national identity and very much a theme in the recent flowering of Romanian cinema. Persistent unluckiness, low self-esteem and compensatory pomposity define the comic universe of The Treasure, Corneliu Porumboiu's most recent film, for instance. That movie, which opened in New York a few weeks ago, might be described as a perverse folk tale set in the present day. Its dry, wry minimalism will be familiar to devotees of the Romanian New Wave. Mr. Jude, while he shares with his contemporaries an unsentimental interest in human folly and failure, departs from the naturalism that has been their collective signature for the last decade. Shot in richly toned, wide-screen black and white, Aferim! looks like an elegant exercise in period playacting. But it casts a fierce, revisionist eye on the past, finding the cruelty and prejudice that lie beneath the pageantry... The systematic destruction of human dignity is painful to witness, but in Aferim! it's just a fact of life. Mr. Jude has no interest in preaching, or in flattering modern audiences by re-enacting the bygone horrors of the old days. Anti-Roma bigotry and extreme inequality have hardly vanished from Romania, and the political implications of the story ripple far beyond that country's borders. But there is nothing grim or scolding about this movie. Quite the opposite: It is raucous, funny and full of life. Nor does the collision of moral horror and profane humor seem in any way forced, as it might in, let's say, a Quentin Tarantino movie. Constandin, an inexhaustible talker, overflowing with corny wisdom, snippets of poetry and philosophical musings, resembles one of Mr. Tarantino's garrulous bounty hunters. He also seems entirely at home in his milieu, even as he is troubled from time to time by stirrings of compassion or remorse. Mr. Corban, who may be familiar to fans of Romanian film from his work in Mr. Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest and Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, gives an exuberantly soulful performance. He has some of Anthony Quinn's rough charisma, and a touch of the loose, wised-up humor that John Wayne brought to his later westerns. In another kind of film--maybe the kind more in tune with Oscar-time magical thinking--Constandin might be a hero, a man of conscience awakened by the injustice in which he's implicated. But Mr. Jude loves humanity too much to tell comforting lies about it. His pessimism i
ASIN: B01F4DSMC0
VSKU: DBV.B01F4DSMC0.G
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