WHEN EVENING FALLS ON BUCHAREST OR METABOLISM ***
Corneliu Porumboiu
2013
IDEA: A filmmaker struggles to get his film made while having an affair with one of his actresses.
BLURB: When Evening Falls on Bucharest or
Metabolism is nothing so
much as a self-reflexive critique of a self-important character, a film
self-consciously designed to deflate its own protagonist’s dogmatic, self-centered
worldview. That’s a lot of “selfs,” which indicates how much of a hermetic,
closed-circuit conceptual exercise Porumboiu’s film is. But if it doesn’t
exactly look beyond itself, When Evening
Falls… nevertheless stimulates in its meta-textual games, and
delights in how it uses its form to poke fun at itself and the aforementioned
protagonist’s creative ego. As the hunched, black turtleneck-clad Paul, Bogdan
Dumitrache embodies the pedantry and pretentiousness of a filmmaker who
believes in only one mode and method of cinema, tied to a specious notion of
realism. But when he’s not undermining his own stringent philosophies,
Porumboiu is doing it for him, deploying formalism to wryly contradict the pompous director’s dictates. So, when Paul
says he’s shooting on film due to the productive restrictions it imposes,
mentioning that film can record no longer than 11 minutes continuously,
Porumboiu shoots in long takes around that length to underline the
arbitrariness of such material limits. And when Paul suggests the supreme
naturalism of long takes, Porumboiu shows us just how mannered they can be. By
focusing on and believing only in what he can control in his film, Paul fails
to account for all the other contingencies that impact his project. Ironically,
it’s the footage of his endoscopy that’s the most “real,” successful thing he
produces, and it’s not even his. When the film ends by having Alina take over
the center of both Paul’s and Porumboiu’s films, the image of the solipsistic man
is finally expelled, symbolically supplanted by the more flexible body, and
mind, he disavows.
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