One of the most interesting movies of the good year that was 2024 for Romanian cinema, a film that I had been waiting to see for over a year, is ‘Săptămâna mare‘ (‘The Holy Week‘). The film is written and directed by Andrei Cohn, who chose to start from ‘O făclie de Paște’ (‘An Easter Torch’), playwright and writer I.L. Caragiale’s short story published in 1889-90, a text that caused a scandal upon its publication, continued to stir up disputes and controversies over the decades, and is still debated today from different, sometimes opposing perspectives. In fact, I’m not sure that today it could be published as Caragiale wrote it. He started from the text of the great writer and playwright, developed it and deepened some of its directions and was not afraid that his film would generate controversy, just like the original text. I appreciated many of the directions Cohn went in as a screenwriter and director, but I couldn’t help but feel that the film wasn’t as sharp as the short story. It’s perhaps also because I didn’t find the brevity and precision with which Caragiale expressed feelings like fear or sarcasm in a few well-chosen words or lines. That’s probably natural. A film over two hours long can’t be as focused as a ten-page short story. The film is interesting, important, and invites viewing and debate, but it also has a few problems that, in my opinion, decrease its consistency.
The film’s story is moved from Moldova to Dobrogea, and the historical period in which it takes place (the end of the 19th century) is clearly delimited by references to the Zionist movement emerging among Romanian Jewry (among the first in the world) in those decades. This geographical change is significant, because Dobrogea had recently become part of the Kingdom of Romania. It was a territory where both communities were relatively recently established, living in an uneasy coexistence marked by conflicts and prejudices. The Jew Leiba is the innkeeper of a village where the majority of the population is formed of Orthodox Romanians, but where Roma, Turks and Tatars also live. The Romanian Gheorghe is his servant – drunkard, a bit lazy and with a dubious past. The two find themselves in a class conflict amplified by religious differences, which are in turn exacerbated by the Holy Week, the one preceding Orthodox Christian Easter, when the story takes place. I found the idea of screenwriter Andrei Cohn to change the reason for the worsening conflict to a misunderstanding caused by mutual ignorance of the traditions of the other community excellent. Leiba fires Gheorghe, who threatens to return on Easter night to take revenge. Concerns for business and family, for his pregnant wife Sura, who had been the victim of an assault, and for his son, together with the mocking indifference of the authorities who refuse to protect them, gradually transform Leiba’s natural fear into an obsession beyond all proportion. On the fateful night, any horror is possible.
Andrei Cohn has developed many of the details of the story in a style that is much closer to naturalistic realism than to the almost surrealistic sarcasm of the original. As a result, the narrative is more Slavici than Caragiale. The Romanian village is reconstructed with great attention to detail. Andrei Butica‘s cinematography is one of the most beautiful in recent Romanian films, with wide shots that emphasize the ethnographic and natural context, with the fixed camera creating memorable tableaux with moving images. The weakest part seemed to me to be the way in which the atmosphere in the Jewish house and home of Leiba’s family is portrayed. Jews from rural areas or even those from the shtetls at the end of the 19th century rarely spoke Romanian at home. Jewish prayers were not said in Romanian, even though, since 1883, Moses Gastner’s bi-lingual Siddur (book of prayers) already existed. Doru Bem, Leiba’s interpreter, transposes the character’s slide into obsession well onto the screen, but his physical and psychological profile resembles more that of a Jewish intellectual from the city rather than that of a village innkeeper. On the other hand, the character of Gheorghe, also well played by Ciprian Chiricheș, seemed schematic and caricatured to me. The changes at the end of the story are significant. Leiba’s violent act is not in ‘Săptămâna mare‘ an almost spontaneous and self-defense act, but an act of preventive revenge in which the aggressor is not the only victim. The final scene added to the film suggests that prejudice and hostility are propagated to subsequent generations. The message remains valid and current: anti-Semitism, like other forms of racism and xenophobia, are born of ignorance. Prejudice cannot be tolerated or minimized. Limitation to mocking words or economic conflicts is not guaranteed and the slide into crime and horror is always possible.