Films about migrations, emigrants and immigrants are an important genre in world cinema, but not in Romanian cinema. ‘Jaful secolului‘ a.k.a. ‘The Heist of the Century‘ (which also circulates worldwide with the alternative titles ‘Traffic‘ and ‘Rheostat‘) has as its main theme the fate of Romanians living and working abroad. The dispersion of the population in search of a better life (especially from an economic point of view), made possible by the opening of European borders, is the dominant social phenomenon of the last 35 years of Romanian history. It also happens in most, if not all, countries of former Eastern Europe, but it reaches record numbers in Romania. And yet, Romanian cinema has produced surprisingly few films that look into the personal traumas and socio-economic dissonances of this migration. One of them was the debut film, over a decade ago, of Teodora Mihai, who also directed ‘Jaful secolului‘. The script is written by Cristian Mungiu, the filmmaker who paved the way for the successes of the Romanian New Wave two decades ago. Mungiu is also a co-producer of this film, which is actually a co-production of film studios from Romania, the Netherlands and Belgium. Among other co-producers we find the names of the Dardenne brothers. Unlike the films that made Mungiu famous, ‘Jaful secolului‘ does not look to the past and (even though the story is based on a real event that occurred in 2012) is completely immersed in the present – a painful and complicated present for the film’s heroes.
The script is inspired by an art theft in Rotterdam, a case that has not been fully elucidated to this day. At that time, seven famous paintings worth tens of millions of euros were stolen from an exhibition. It seemed to have been the work of professionals, who had operated with formidable speed, demonstrating a good knowledge of the places and disappearing before the police could show up and secure the area and the escape routes. The traces soon led to a gang of criminals from Romania. Screenwriter Mungiu started from these facts and built a fictional hypothesis not so much about the way the criminals acted, but about the reasons that led them to commit the theft. The first part of the film is a combination of a heist plot about the planning and execution of the theft, combined with the story of the young couple formed by Natalia and Ginel, who left Romania for Western Europe to overcome the economic difficulties at home. In the second part, the action moves back to the town on the Danube where the two take refuge together with their loot, after the heist story goes wrong.
From the Western viewer’s point of view, it could be an immigration film combined with the story of a famous theft at the time and the complicated investigation that followed. None of these narrative threads are conventional, however. What primarily interested the filmmakers was the meeting between the two cultural and historical hemispheres of Europe. The tolerant democracy of the West, which accepts foreign economic immigrants on condition that they respect a set of rules that include social and economic distancing and differentiation, meets the feelings and resentments of Eastern Europeans who are forced to accept socio-economic inferiority and feel misunderstood and unaccepted by the majority society they have arrived in. Corruption and abuse exist in both societies and they only exacerbate the differences and conflicts. The motivations for the theft are completely different from those suspected by the investigators and probably most viewers.
The film benefits from some remarkable acting performances. Anamaria Vartolomei is a rising star of European cinema and this role in a (partly) Romanian film only adds value to her successful creations of recent years. Ionut Niculae and Rares Andrici both manage to give life to two viable and credible characters. A gallery of well-drawn authentic figures surrounds the heroes during the period they live in the Netherlands and in the hometown where they return. I cannot say the same about the investigators who resemble too much the clichés of investigators and prosecutors from many other Romanian films. I liked the cinematography less. I think it wanted to suggest the cold and indifferent light of the European northwest where the first part of the action takes place, the freeze and poverty of the Romanian environment in the second part. However, too many scenes take place at night, the darkness uniforms and makes the action at certain moments difficult to follow. ‘Jaful secolului‘ (I like the Romanian title much better) is a well made and important film, with a theme that is painful and urgent for both hemispheres of the continent.