Tudor Platon is part of the select club of filmmakers who seem to have spent their childhood with a camera in their hands, and who thus had the opportunity very early on to film the world and the people around them. Naturally, their families became the main characters in the filmed and accumulated materials. In a discussion with the audience, the director and cameraman, who is known today, confessed that he had over two hundred hours of filmed material at his disposal from which he selected and structured ‘O familie aproape perfecta‘ – an original documentary in which the main heroes are his parents, his girlfriend who became the mother of their first child (Carla Fotea, who is also one of the film’s producers) and the director himself. We are therefore dealing with a family documentary, a sub-genre that has recently gained popularity in world and Romanian cinema (‘Tata’ by Radu Ciorniciuc and Lina Vdovii was produced around the same time).
Among the first sequences of the film is an episode filmed with an amateur camera many years ago. Tudor’s parents are at a party. The children ask them to kiss, ‘as a memory’. They do so, with great restraint, briefly and without tenderness. Something already seems not to be working in their relationship, so the following episodes, closer to the present, which describe their decision to separate or at least to live separately after 30 years of marriage, do not come as a surprise. Tudor and Carla are then at the beginning of their relationship. They are of a different generation, communicate much more, try to discuss problems, although words are not easily spoken even between them. As the parents move away and build their separate universes, the young people get closer. We witness a marriage (or a long-term relationship) proposal. Next comes the pregnancy, the first child, the first depressions and crises that they hope to overcome and overcome differently than the generation before them.
The film is built from dialogues and silences that flow smoothly, seemingly without a script or directorial intervention. And yet, upon careful analysis, questions cannot be avoided. The very presence of the cameras changes the way those in the lens behave. How did the child’s hobby influence family life and how intimate can a filmed intimacy be? The parents’ confessions shed light on how the nature and family atmosphere in which they were raised influenced their lives and their own family relationships. Each generation has set out to be different from the previous one, to learn from the mistakes of their parents, but is this always possible? The characters are looking for alternatives, ways to escape from a closed system of relationships, self-knowledge through faith, through esoteric spiritual searches, through the experience of motherhood and fatherhood. The film flows slowly, emotionally charged scenes alternate with those with symbolic value and there is enough time for the audience to put their ideas in order, but also to formulate questions. I don’t know exactly what audience the film is aimed at, but those who choose to see it will have a unique experience.