Film Review - Adalbert’s Dream

It is apt that Bucharest’s recent bout of footballing glory – albeit the vicarious triumph of competently hosting a European final rather than a Romanian team winning something – should coincide with the release of Gabriel Achim’s debut feature film.

In 1986 Steaua Bucharest improbably beat Barcelona to win the European Cup, thanks to goalkeeper Helmuth Duckadam heroically saving four penalties in the deciding shootout. Footage of this, set evocatively to an operatic score, opens the movie.

The protagonist is not Adalbert, but Iulica (Gabriel Spahiu), a geeky yet good-humored engineer at a typical Communist-era factory. Despite his whining wife, morose mistress and belligerent boss, Iulica has managed to maintain his cheery disposition, and savors life’s small pleasures, such as celebrating the Steaua win with his son, work banter and smuggling in an illicit video machine so his boss can re-watch the game.

The factory is staging an elaborate event to mark the Communist Party’s 65th anniversary, which includes the showing of two films made by staff. As in The Legend of the Official Visit, one of the short stories that made up the 2009 portmanteau film Tales from the Golden Age (in which Spahiu also had a role), huge amounts of time and effort are put into covering up the usual slapdash goings-on and impressing the party bigwigs with pomp and bombast – an endeavor doomed, inevitably, to backfire.

Embracing the Romanian New Wave, Adalbert’s Dream is marked by black humor, a focus on the absurdities of life under the last years of the Communist regime, a realistic style, slow pace and pared down aesthetic. But the film also harks back further into local cinema history, with an homage to Reconstruction, the seminal 1968 Lucian Pintilie movie in which the reconstruction of a trivial scrap between two boys, filmed for the public edification, escalates into a far worse catastrophe than the original incident.

It all sounds quintessentially Romanian, and indeed it is. However, the story also works on a more universal, human level. A wonderful scene where Iulica and his boss are dispatched to take a high-up’s infirm mother to a hospital appointment will have comic resonance with anyone who has felt a helpless surge of impatience with a slow-moving person. There are also some very funny lines.

Achim’s debut feature is an experimental work with a surrealist vein. The director interpolates scenes depicting a fox fable into the main story, and one of the short films broadcast, the eponymous Adalbert’s Dream, is a bizarre, high-concept affair involving a large, floating tool, wholly unsuited to its audience of skeptical blue-collar workers and party chiefs.

Offbeat, dark and wry, Adalbert’s Dream fuses comedy, tragedy, realism and surrealism into a memorable whole, a satisfying new entry into the New Wave canon.

Debbie Stowe