‘Doar cu buletinul la Paris‘ is a film I almost avoided seeing. Judging by its title, it seemed to be one of those Romanian comedies blessed with an excellent cast, but which generally recirculates and perpetuates overused jokes. In the end, however, I decided to see it because of the name of director Serban Marinescu and of some of the actors in the cast. I had a pleasant surprise.’Doar cu buletinul la Paris‘ employs that same sarcastic and desperate comic of Romanian films after 1990 (on the line of ‘Philanthropy‘) but manages to insert some interesting and authentic moments of cinema, and provides the opportunity of an extraordinary supporting role to Dorel Visan, one of the the great Romanian actors whose talent was somehow pre-empted from expressing themselves by the stereotypical distribution in roles appropriate to the patterns of the epochs. Here the actor seems to take full revenge, perhaps creating the role of his life or in any case the role of the latest part of his career.
The principal hero of the film is a teacher of French language and literature (Mircea Diaconu), single, aging, whose dream is to get to see Paris for a few days. The discipline he teaches has become useless and obsolete like Romania’s francophony. Paris is now seemingly at hand, Romania is in Europe, its citizens cross borders without a passport, but with the hero’s poor teacher’s salary it would take him about ten years to raise money for the trip. He hopes to be included in a bus trip organized by the city hall, but the corrupt mayor replaces him at the last minute with his secretary, who is also his mistress. This is the starting point of a series of events in which vile or ridiculous characters steal from each other, in which the lack of chances of the unfortunates of the transition leads some to pathetic speeches, others to sublime but ultimately useless goodness acts.
Mircea Diaconu enters very well the role of the naive, but I can’t help feeling that he is repeating the same role in some of his films from the last two decades. The same can be said about Razvan Vasilescu who plays the role of the perfect vilain, the opportunistic and unscrupulous trafficket enriched at the expense of his neighbors. The best acting belongs to Dorel Visan, who interprets an archetype of the generation of pensioners hit by the slow and unfair transition, misinformed by television and contaminated by the virus of nostalgia for communism. Director Serban Marinescu uses several times the process of direct dialogue between the main hero and the spectator (a la Woody Allen) which works perfectly here, and adapts the movements of the camera to the story. The interior staircase of the block is filmed at angles specific to horror movies, in the scenes in which the television team shows up he uses a mobile camera as in live reporting. The good cinematography, the actors’ performances, the approaching of a familiar theme through well-written dialogues mixing absurd and sarcasm made this film to exceed my expectations. The ending is one of desperate optimism.