When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 02 January 2015 10:36

Written by Jack Angstreich

Beginning on January 9th, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be opening Corneliu Porumboiu’s When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism —about the relations between a film director (Bogdan Dumitrache) and his actress (Diana Avramut), as well as his producer (Mihaela Sirbu), in the periods between shooting —for a one-week, exclusive engagement. 

By the early 1990s, three relatively marginal world cinemas— those of Iran, Taiwan and China’s Fifth Generation — had begun to generate a sustained enthusiasm in programmers, critics and cinephiles, followed several years later by a similar renaissance in South Korea, Thailand, and now the Philippines. Partly concurrent with these these developments has been the emergence of especially three filmmakers — Porumboiu himself, Cristi Puiu, and Cristian Munguiu — whose work has heralded a resurgence of the Romanian cinema within the past several years, commanding international attention, whilst the intrinsic interest of this efflorescence is further confirmed by this new, captivating film. 

 When Evening Falls on Bucharest is elegantly shot in a series of long-takes, with no cutting within scenes — a trademark of advanced cinema worldwide, also employed by Puiu and Mungiu. (It is interesting to consider the arguably non-Bazinian impetus behind this practice in contemporary filmmakers like Bela Tarr, Abbas Kiarostami, or Hou Hsiao-Hsien, as contrasted with the new realism of pioneers of a similar technique such as Jean Renoir, Kenji Mizoguchi, Orson Welles, Max Ophuls, Carl Dreyer and Luchino Visconti.) The behavioral details of quotidian interaction are here meticulously realized, one of the many pleasures of this remarkable work.

If Porumboiu’s achievement here is less startling and consequential than that of his earlier, gripping Police, Adjective —which had its local premiere in the New York Film Festival as did several other works of this Romanian new wave — with this new film he is nonetheless profitably mining a a rich naturalistic stream that has its roots in the practice of such magisterial forebears as Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes, amongst others. Also, like many features of this past year, When Evening Falls on Bucharestis evidence of an increasing mastery of the digital format, which one hopes will no longer be the mere “bastard-child” of celluloid, something it has taken most significant cinematographers and directors several years to develop.