24/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: Sebastian Mihăilescu’s fiction debut is one of the very few Romanian surrealist dramas

After he directed a host of short films starting in 2012, Romanian director Sebastian Mihăilescu’s feature debut was the well-received documentary hybrid You Are Ceauşescu to Me [+see also:
film review
film profile] in 2021, and now, his first fiction outing, Mammalia [+see also:
trailer
film profile], is being screened in the Berlinale’s Forum sidebar. The film is a highly personal, surrealist drama exploring the director’s (and other men’s) anxieties regarding what manhood still means in times when men’s role in society is being challenged.

The film, written by Andrei Epure (who also co-wrote Ştefan Constantinescu’s Man and Dog [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ştefan Constantinescu
film profile], a film about a husband obsessed with his wife’s infidelity), focuses on Camil (István Téglás), a man who feels that his girlfriend Andreea (Mălina Manovici) is getting more and more estranged from him after joining a women’s commune. One day, Andreea disappears, and Camil goes to great lengths to find her. But, if in some films men save women, here, it is very unclear who needs saving and from what.

The film finds imaginative ways to question identity and masculinity, and as the increasingly unpredictable events go on, viewers may find themselves baffled by how brutally set in stone their views are on what is expected of a man in society. Everything that happens in the movie contradicts, or at least questions, these expectations, slowly forcing the audience to accept that perhaps their views are biased. As we see Camil frantically (and more often than not comically) trying to find Andreea – without whose soothing presence his life increasingly deteriorates into tatters – we are also invited to ponder what we take for granted in our relationships.

Of course, at times it seems a lot of effort has been put into making the screenplay quirky and unpredictable, but avoiding the usual tropes one may find in arthouse films is not necessarily enough to come up with a good story. Mammalia is such a personal film that it might endure only as a footnote to the usual Romanian dramas or as a commentary on the very masculine Romanian cinema, where compelling heroines are significantly rarer than the heroes.

In Mihăilescu’s film, (heterosexual) men fail systematically. Camil is shy and clumsy, seemingly always on the verge of a panic attack. We could say that his wild search for Andreea takes him outside of his comfort zone, but we would be wrong: there is no comfort zone for him. He looks like a man who has always wondered what is expected of him, without being aware that, actually, nothing is. Mammalia even contains a scene that looks like the visual equivalent of a very famous (at least in Romania) and oft-quoted (usually in contexts regarding male disappointments) saying by Moldovan poet Eugen Cioclea: “Man is a useless appendage of his dick.”

Interestingly, only a few main characters are played by professional actors. They are surrounded by amateurs who, according to the director, brought their own snippets of reality into the story, which is perhaps the reason why Mammalia feels so unpredictable, as if Mihăilescu shot little scenes happening in front of him with “characters” that he couldn’t (and wouldn’t want to) control in any way.

Mammalia was produced by microFilm (Romania), and co-produced by Pandora Film (Germany) and Extreme Emotions (Poland). The international sales are handled by Lights On.