‘Moromeții 3‘ (the title of the international distribution is ‘The Moromete Family 3: Father and Son‘) is the third film in the series inspired by Marin Preda‘s novels. It is again directed by Stere Gulea and was filmed in 2022-23 and released in 2024, 37 years after the first film. The film, this time, is not a screen adaptation of a novel. Stere Gulea based the script on documents and the press of the time, on intimate diaries and on direct testimonies of characters and personalities who lived in the 1950s. ‘Moromeții 3‘ can be considered a continuation of the first two series (the story takes place almost a decade after the events described in ‘Moromeții 2’) but also a kind of prequel, the film ending with the genesis of the novel that opens the entire Moromete family saga. The main character is Niculae Moromete, the youngest son in the family and the young rebel, so different from the rest of the family that we met in the previous series and who had become in 1954, the year when the story takes place, one of the young writers on the rise. The period, however, is that of the political terror that characterized the first decade of the communist regime. The pact with the devil seems inevitable to succeed as a writer or simply to survive.
Niculae Moromete lives between or perhaps inside several worlds. Like millions of Romanian in the generations of those times, he makes the transition from the village to the city, but not to become a factory worker, clerk, intellectual or party activist, but a writer. He is talented, an idealistic communist, a lover of life and of women (who loved him back). He soon acquires the status of a ‘comrade writer’, dresses in city clothes, meets intellectuals of various orientations, some associated with and enrolled by the communist regime, others with different ideas, living in the shadows and in fear. He maintains a passionate love relationship with Vera, a married woman, also a talented poet. The awakening begins when one of his successful stories is turned into a propaganda film with which he returns to his native village and the surrounding poor region, in the fever of forced collectivization. The moderate and wise words of his father, but especially a violent incident of repression of the protests of peasants opposing collectivization, awaken his doubts about the political path that had deceived him and with which he had collaborated until then. However, it was not the time of doubts, but rather of the Stalinist slogan ‘whoever is not with us is against us’. Niculae Moromete will find himself in the dilemma of an intellectual forced to live and create under a dictatorship. If he does not accept the compromise, he risks not only his social status but also his right to publish, and in the extreme, his own freedom. His personal life also becomes complicated, his relationship with Vera is about to fall apart, and many of those he considered friends turn their backs on him out of cowardice or envy. To what extent can the young writer accept compromises? How can he find his authentic voice and how can he reflect, in his prose, his inner truth under conditions of censorship and ideological pressures?
I tried to watch ‘Moromeții 3‘ from the perspective of the Romanian viewer, but also of those who are not familiar with Romanian history or literature. For those of us who were educated in Romania, Niculae Moromete is clearly Marin Preda and the film proposes a very credible version of the personal trajectory, the pressures and influences, and the intimate resources that generated the writing of the novel ‘Moromeții’ in such a way that it became one of the best books of Romanian literature of the 20th century, but was also one that could be published in 1955. The foreign viewer will probably view the story on a more general level, the artist’s dilemmas creating under dictatorship having a universal resonance. However, it will also be an opportunity, for all spectators, to get to know the Romanian society and its diverse social environments (that of the village and that of the intellectuals from the city) in these years. The extremely suggestive style of the filming also helps with this. Stere Gulea works here again, as in the other films of the trilogy, with cinematographer Vivi Dragan Vasile, and together, the two create a complex, realistic and suggestive image of the era, using black and white coloring. I must also mention here the creators of the sets and costumes who were extremely attentive to all the details, from the porches of peasant houses to the interiors of city apartments or the artists’ ‘houses of creation’ of the era, from the dresses of girls and women to the underwear in intimate scenes. Horatiu Malaele returns as the father, Ilie Moromete, and I am glad that two great actors (him and Victor Rebengiuc) played the role in the films of the trilogy, leaving us not one but two reference versions of the character. Alex Calin was cast in the role of Niculae Moromete, who melted into the role to such an extent that I don’t think I can imagine the character’s figure otherwise. Olimpia Melinte is Vera, a complex, passionate and beautiful woman as her lovers saw her. Mara Bugarin got the role of Aurora, the other, the younger woman in Niculae’s life, the one who convinces him to continue working on the novel and publish it, sensing its value and its chance with the readers. I really like this young actress that I noticed in ‘Metronome’, but this second love story seemed less convincing to me, as if something was missing exactly in the feelings, in the way the connection between the two is established. It is one of the few critical observations I can find for this remarkable film, which completes in an original but convincing way a significant trilogy about the people and the changes that Romania went through in the middle of the last century.