The Treasure

THE TREASURE   ***1/2

Corneliu Porumboiu

2015

IDEA:  In dire economic straits, a man recruits his neighbor to help search for treasure allegedly buried by his great-grandfather before the Communist takeover.

BLURB:  With The Treasure, Corneliu Porumboiu takes the simplest of metaphors – digging in the earth as an excavation of the past – and turns it into the locus of a characteristically droll, mordant portrait of post-Communist Romanian society. As in his other films, the accumulating subtext derives from how a seemingly straightforward activity becomes enfolded in a host of complicated (and complicating) procedural factors, drawing from the quotidian a dense tangle of socio-historical vectors. And that tangle constitutes, for Porumboiu, the fundamentally absurd social fabric of a contemporary Romania, where the past is paradoxically a memory both vague and indelible, and the vestiges of Communism live in vexed relation with the structures of capitalism. It’s an awkward hybridity evinced by the characters’ tetchy interactions, which are informed as much by civic or filial kinship as by capitalist transaction, financial desperation, and questions of material ownership. Porumboiu underscores these ideas against backdrops that range from austerely bureaucratic to quasi-purgatorial, culminating in the protracted treasure hunting scene, whose long, recursive takes hardly seem to signal the promise of a life-changing bounty. Of course, that’s beside the point: what is symbolically disinterred is the country’s fractured 20^th-century history, with the hole as the gouge of the Ceaușescu era and its contents the tentative economic transformation that followed. Neither, alas, are reassuring. In its final sequence, which plays like a bitterly ironic punchline to this mischievous, multi-layered 90-minute joke, The Treasure suggests a future generation inheriting not the legacy of the past, but the triumphant consumerism of a present they’ve never known as anything else.