Crulic - The Path to Beyond; Film REVIEW

Claudiu Crulic was 33 when he died of self-imposed starvation in a Polish prison in 2007. He had lost about half his body weight and resembled a man twice his age. These sobering facts are relayed in the first few minutes of Anca Damian’s animated documentary. The film then goes back in time to Claudiu’s childhood, weaving family photographs and biographical details with quirky, almost childlike, hand drawn images. The effect is discomfiting, the scenes at once brutally real and unreal.

After an unremarkable upbringing, Crulic finds himself – like many of his compatriots – trying to cobble together a living on the fringes of European society. He is arrested for the theft of a Polish judge’s wallet. Though the Romanian had been accused of a similar crime before, he protested vehemently that he had been in Milan, not Poland, on the day of this theft, something the evidence appears to corroborate.

But as his file is batted back and forth between various uninterested authorities, Crulic begins to slip through the cracks in the system, and embarks upon a hunger strike to draw attention to his case. The theme of one individual up against an uncaring, impersonal bureaucracy has strong echoes of Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu, the difference being that while the fictional pensioner Mr Lazarescu was quite likely to have died regardless of the treatment he received, the real-life Mr Crulic was in the prime of life before embarking on his drastic and desperate course of action, and could perhaps have been reprieved by the most cursory of police investigations.

It is not easy viewing, the more so because the audience is never allowed to forget that these events happened, recently and nearby, in an EU country. But the bleakness of Damian’s documentary is offset against the poetry of the film, whose visuals often have the innocence of a children’s story. A final sequence of Claudiu’s shroud floating off recalls the plastic bag in American Beauty, and that film’s ironic detachment is found here too. Despite the shocking events and catastrophic failings by the relevant agencies, the director resists the temptation to make a heavy-handed protest film. The movie is elevated by its light touch, owing in part to the understated delivery of Romanian New Wave veteran Vlad Ivanov, narrating as Claudiu.

This sad and important story touches on alienation, crushed hopes, human vulnerability, inhuman bureaucracy. It is a documentary, but it is also a parable of the modern condition.

editorial@business-review.ro

Directed by: Anca Damian
Starring: Vlad Ivanov (voice)
On at: Cinema City Cotroceni, Cinema City Sun Plaza, Grand Cinema Digiplex Baneasa, Hollywood Multiplex