‘Dinți de lapte‘ (‘Milk Teeth‘) is, in its way, a unique film. It is the second auteur film (written and directed) by Mihai Mincan and made as a co-production with international financing and participation. This time, unlike his debut film, the story takes place in Romania, during a critical period of radical change, the year 1989 and the beginning of 1990. It is not new territory for Romanian cinema, many of the films of the Romanian New Wave addressed those months in which the fate of Romania took a radically different turn after half a century that seemed to last an eternity. What is special in Mihai Mincan‘s new film is the perspective from which the change is perceived – through the eyes, soul and dreams of a 10-year-old girl who lives her childhood (as childhood was lived in the final years of the dictatorship) and goes through a traumatic event and its consequences.
In the opening scene of the film, we see a pair of hands cracking nuts, collecting the kernels in a bowl and throwing the shells in a trash can. The second scene begins from a ‘bird’s eye’ perspective to descend into a playground, actually a vacant space between ugly apartment blocks where several children are playing. One of them is Maria. Her sister passes by with a trash can in her hand, we understand that it contains the shells from the previous scene. She exits the frame, the film, perhaps from life. The elder sister disappears, perhaps kidnapped by men in a black car that some witnesses say they saw, but not the viewers. The black cars were used by the authorities and the privileged of the regime. The absence of the missing girl dominates the film. The militia investigates the parents, but the routine of inefficiency and the distrust between the people and the system’s officials can also be felt. Maria does her own investigation and explores, together with two other children, an abandoned industrial hall where a vagrant is sheltering. The girl matures in the atmosphere of resignation and depression that characterizes people’s lives, she feels guilty for the disappearance of her sister (in fact, it was her turn to throw out the garbage). The childhood ceremonies invented by the system (admission in the pioneers’ organization) cannot fill her life devoid of toys and hope. Reality and dreams (more like nightmares) are difficult to delimit. The little girl also witnesses the breakup of her family. The father, who internalizes his pain by trying to focus his affection on his remaining daughter, leaves the mother who had continued her obsessively but in vain searches, desperate and frustrated by the apathy of the authorities. A revolution is happening all around, but we do not see it at all in the lives of the heroes. The spring of ’90, the first in freedom, finds the family divided and equally devoid of hope.
Young actress Emma Ioana Mogos plays the role of the little girl exceptionally well, and part of the credit goes, of course, to the director. She is present even when we don’t see her, because the camera takes over her role, either in reality or in imagination or dreams. George Chiper‘s camera is held in the hand in most scenes, as in amateur films, emphasizing the atmosphere of authenticity, the heroine’s perspective and the general state of nervousness and psychological pressure. The reconstruction of the gray and horizonless atmosphere of the late 1980s is very precise with the ugliness of the urban and industrial landscapes and the ridiculous school uniforms with their humiliating personal numbers visibly sewn. I noticed a few inaccurate details – closing balconies was prohibited in the last decade of the dictatorship, insulated glazing was not yet practiced, also I don’t think DNA tests were practiced by the Romanian militia in the 1980s -, these could have been avoided, but probably some of the filmmakers were not born then. In a way, ‘Dinți de lapte‘ feels like it comes too late. It could have been made 15 or 20 years ago. But it has a quality and consistency in style that gives me a lot of hope and confidence in what Mihai Mincan can do. I look forward to his next films with great interest.