18/05/2011

Five years after his film How I Spent the End of the World [+see also:
trailer
film profile] won the Best Actress Award in the Un Certain Regard of the Cannes Film Festival, Romanian director Catalin Mitulescu is back in the sidebar section with his second feature, Loverboy [+see also:
trailer
interview: Ada Condeescu
film profile], a sunny love story with a dark side.

The film opens with handsome, bad boy Luca (George Pistereanu, the lead in Florin Serban's If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ada Condeescu
film profile]) riding his scooter in the sunny Romanian countryside near the sea – and already his hard muscles and soft face reflect the two sides of his personality.

On the one hand, he has been accused (though released for lack of evidence) of a mysterious crime involving a girl who loved him, who ended up dead at the hands of some dodgy people to whom he owes money. It soon becomes clear that Luca’s crime consists of enamouring young girls, only to pimp them out – the title of the movie is the nickname the police use for such delinquents.

Yet Luca is also extremely gentle with his sick grandfather, whom he takes care of despite his young age. And his apparent indifference towards most everyone else is sometimes interspersed with flashes of offhanded kindness.

His lives his hard-earned, seemingly carefree existence under the summer sun virtually by himself, driving fast cars, seducing any girl he wants almost literally with the snap of his fingers. All that changes when he meets the only girl who can really put a smile on his inscrutable baby face, Veli (Ada Condeescu, who also starred opposite Pistereanu in Whistle). A tanned, healthy natural beauty, Veli is the one girl who doesn't lose sight of her free will in his presence – she just often chooses to say yes.

The refreshing love story that blossoms between them almost completely erases Luca’s gloomy memory of his police line-up in the beginning of the film, and of the scratches and scars he would inflict upon himself. Yet he tells his tender “princess” that something in him is still "wrong", conveying the same awful doubt to the viewer, who suddenly recalls how he said he loved the girl who turned up dead.

Thus, after building a luminous love story, Mitulescu leaves us with this disturbing notion and a sacrifice on Veli’s part, which may either prove of deny the possibility of true love.

(Translated from French)