CANNES, France (Reuters) – “Tales from the Golden Age,” the latest product of Romania’s film New Wave, paints a comic picture of the daily fight to get by and outwit authority in a communist government bent on making life difficult.
The series of vignettes by five different directors brings Cristian Mungiu back to the Cannes film festival, where he triumphed in 2007 by winning the Palme d’Or with the grim abortion drama “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days.”
This time, the take on life in the “Golden Age” of the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu is more light-hearted, reflecting the black humor that helped Romanians survive the shortages, petty harassment and stifling authoritarianism.
“The best jokes I’ve ever heard were from the communist period,” Hanno Hoeffer, one of the other directors who collaborated on the project told Reuters in an interview. “Now they’ve all disappeared because there’s nothing to joke about.”
The film, being shown in the “Un certain regard” section of the festival, begins as a village nervously prepares to greet an official convoy with a display of poetry and local produce.
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