Film review: Kyra Kyralina

The well-known Romanian film director Dan Pita has managed to finish Kyra Kyralina movie after more than 20 years since he had in mind to do so, and the results can be seen on the Romanian screens starting September 5, 2014: a Baroque movie, which tries to reconstruct the life of a dysfunctional family from 1920s, with impressive interiors, costumes (Oana Paunescu) and music (Adrian Enescu), following partially the plot of the homonymous book.

Expected to be a set of interlocking narratives concerning a young gay man in a world somewhat more liberal sexually in the late years of the Ottoman Empire, is in fact a family story seen through the eyes of the young man, but focusing on the two female characters. Kyra (Iulia Dumitru) is the libertine mother of Dragomir (Stefan Iancu, in the role of young Dragomir and Corneliu Ulici, in the role of old Dragomir) and Kyralina (Iulia Cirstea), who enjoys oriental parties with foreigners in the attempt of finding Kyralina a husband, but she is terrified by her own husband, Rotarul (Mircea Rusu), who from time to time visit them and beats both wife and children. The story concentrates on finding love and happiness in a world of fear, revenge and opulence.

Dan Pita recreated the story written by the famous Romanian novelist Panait Istrati, known worldwide as one of the great modernists and a great storyteller, “a teller of Oriental tales, and once he launches into a story, no one knows, not even him, if it will last an hour or a thousand and one nights. The Danube and its meanders…”, as Romain Rolland has written on the preface of the book that made Istrati famous, Kyra Kyralina.

At its launching in 1923, the book was an immediate sensation in Europe because Istrati was first noted for the depiction of one homosexual character in his work, the Dragomir character, who director Dan Pita didn’t create him in this direction as we all expected. Dragomir is mentioning his sexual preferences in two scenes, one as a memoir after he goes to prison and in the end, when old-Dragomir met again his dying uncle, Ilie (Florin Zamfirescu), who has a cautionary role and who also has the key of understanding what was going on the screen for the last 70 minutes.

The greatest merit of this movie is the fact that Dan Pita really recreated the same atmosphere as the author, as well as Pita’s ability to construct frames and to alternate light and shadow planes, everything wrapped up in excellent music which actually shifted the audience to those times. What director didn’t manage to complete for Istrati’s world was the actors – their performance isn’t what it should be and none of the author’s main key points can be found in the film: nothing about erotic passion, nothing about incestuous brotherhood love and very little about the revenge.