Eight Postcards from Utopia review – found-footage fever dream of post-Ceauşescu Romania

Diverting mosaic of moments from 1990s TV ads, frantically flogging everything from sausages to laxatives, shows Romania’s newfound passion for capitalismPart of cinema’s Romanian wave has been a shrewd, satirically surreal use of archive clips as a way of remembering the strangeness of the country’s communist and pre-communist past. In 2010, Andrei Ujică’s three-hour The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu was a film footage collage of his dictatorial life and times; and in 2020 Radu Jude’s The Exit of the Trains used official archive material to shed light on wartime antisemitism. Jude, with co-director Christian Ferencz-Flatz, has now curated a found-footage fever dream of Romania’s post-Ceauşescu passion for capitalism.It is a mosaic of moments from TV ads in the 1990s, frantically flogging everything: soft drinks, sausages, laxatives, a new Dracula-based theme park, shares in Thatcher-style government privatisation schemes and mobile phones. One rather witty ad has Ceauşescu making a speech being interrupted by a phone – the tagline promises “free speech”. Romanian legends like Ilie Năstase and Nadia Comăneci appear, while the clips are broadly divided into chapter-headings; one tranche of ads displaying gender stereotypes is introduced with the Godardian intertitle “Masculine Feminine”. Sometimes Jude and Ferencz-Flatz take out the audio entirely so we can just focus on the eerie garish images in silence. Freeze-frames show us the quasi-porn ecstatic closing of eyes at the moment of taste. Ads for actual porn phone lines show us something similar. In one “cutting room floor” moment, we see multiple takes of an unhappy actor in an ad for financial services stumbling over the line “We all strive to multiply your money” over and over again. Continue reading...

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