I confess that had to use Google after watching the Romanian film ‘Mikado‘ (2021) directed by Emanuel Parvu to decipher its title. I found out that mikado is a game that I knew as a child under the name ‘Marocco‘ (which is also the alternative title of the movie), in which a bunch of sticks of about 20 cm are dropped on the table, in order to then being picked up by one player at a time without touching the others. The problem is that in their fall the sticks overlap anarchically and it is very difficult to remove them without moving others. Just like in life, just like in the story told in the movie, any movement of a stick or any action of a man touches and influences others. ‘Mikado‘ is a film relating to our immediate reality (the characters wear anti-virus masks, but the pandemic is not mentioned except for a curse on a mask) and at the same time a parable about how our actions affect the lives of those in around us. The title of the film is neither the only enigmatic nor the only clever element of the story.
‘Mikado‘ begins as a family drama. Cristi is a 40-year-old man, one of those who has managed relatively well in life, owns his business, makes hospital donations, but his life and that of his teenage daughter, Magda, have been marked by the tragedy of the death of his wife of cancer. He has a new girlfriend, younger than him, but his relationship with his daughter is not very good – maybe because of the presence of the new woman in their lives, maybe because of his impulsive character. When a necklace given as a gift for Magda’s birthday is lost and found in the hospital where the girl volunteered and her father was a donor, a conflict erupts. The collateral victim is the mother of Iulian, Magda’s boyfriend, who was a nurse at that hospital. Threatened with dismissal, she has a heart attack and dies the same day. Is Cristi morally responsible? Maybe even criminally responsible? Is family anger justified? Can money make up for the loss of a mother? Can the relationship between the two young folks at the beginning of their lives survive the tragedy? These are some of the questions the film’s script asks, and the best part of the approach is that the answers are not served to the audience. The evolution of the conflict from a minor family drama to serious social drama with detective and legal overtones is built gradually, with patience and sensitivity. The moral aspects are always in the attention of the screenwriters and of the director, and you can’t help but wonder, as a spectator, how you would have reacted in similar situations. The end is debatable. I will not reveal it, of course. I will only mention that when I watched the movie, it seemed a bit forced, with a second concentration of coincidences that harms credibility, but reflecting later I came to the conclusion that the ending contains enough elements of ambiguity – especially by filming style and angles – which leave room for different interpretations. I would call it an apparently closed or a camouflaged open ending.
I liked the cinematography created by Silviu Stavilã. Most of the scenes take place in interiors, in the two apartments of Cristi and Iulian, and interesting filming angles (from above) are used that put the characters in a spatial and relational context. When going out into the streets, the camera shows us the image of an anonymized city (it can be Bucharest or another bigger city of Romania), usually filmed at night, from cars. Serban Pavlu is one of the best Romanian film and theater actors of the moment and I did not expect from him anything else but the excellent performance I received. The two young actors who play the roles of teenagers are true revelations: Tudor Cucu-Dumitrescu is a credible Iulian, transformed by tragedy from a luminous positive young man into a furious one, but Ana Indricau is the one who dominates all the scenes in which she appears , with the injured sensitivity of a teenager hit from all directions. Emanuel Parvu, himself an actor, obviously knows how to work with actors and get the best out of them.
‘I did not know!’ is a phrase that several characters in the film declame at various moments of the story. This is where the main message of ‘Mikado‘ lies. Life is full of uncertainties and dilemmas. Every action has consequences, and these are often far more serious than points lost in a game.