21/10/2024 - Teodora Ana Mihai’s second fiction feature is a layered social-realist film looking at inequality and exploitation in our modern world with a healthy dose of humour

After her debut fiction feature, La Civil [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Teodora Ana Mihai
film profile], the winner of the Courage Prize in Un Certain Regard at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, Romanian director Teodora Ana Mihai returns with Traffic [+see also:
trailer
film profile], winner of the Grand Prix in the International Competition at the 40th Warsaw Film Festival. The film, penned by renowned Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days [+see also:
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interview: Cristian Mungiu
interview: Oleg Mutu
film profile], R.M.N. [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Cristian Mungiu
interview: Judith State
film profile]), navigates different registers and locations to tell a thoroughly modern story, yet one as old as time – namely, that of the strong exploiting the weak, and the weak trying to survive.

We first meet our Romanian protagonists in the Netherlands, where they work rather degrading jobs to make ends meet: Ginel (Ionut Niculae) sorts through garbage in a facility, while his wife Natalia (Anamaria Vartolomei, leaning here on her Romanian heritage) works in greenhouses, far from their young daughter who has remained in their small village with Ginel’s elderly mother. Ita (Rareș Andrici), a friend from back home also trying to survive in the city, goes the more dangerous route as a petty crook. Things take a turn when one night, working as a waitress at a party for the elite, Natalia gets attacked, but not before a masked Dutch man rhapsodises at length to her about great paintings. Since he barely even tried to defend her, and because Ita gets more and more cocky in his robberies, Natalia helps Ita find the museum where the Dutch man works, and they proceed to steal invaluable paintings, with the goal of reselling them.

Although Traffic begins in the purely social-realist mode, depicting the harsh reality of exploitative immigrant labour with a directness that nevertheless isn’t without empathy, it swiftly moves into a more comedic and absurdist register as the situation escalates. Ita ensnares Ginel into his plans, but neither of them know much about art (they call Matisse “Matiz”) – or, rather, they know little about the art world and how it operates. While they struggle to accept the rather abstract notion that the Picasso they stole is simply “invaluable” and keep asking for a precise amount in dollars, they discuss the reality behind these pieces of art with great clarity when walking around the museum: these works, be they paintings, sculptures or skeletons of ancient species, were robbed from their owners and makers by white European invaders, who exchange them amongst themselves for their own profit. Thomas Ryckewaert plays the gallery director as a man who thinks of himself as progressive, organising an exhibit about the very notion of colonialism, but when the paintings get stolen, he is more concerned about the way in which they are being stored than the foolish yet understandable act of revenge and survival behind their disappearance.

The film’s second segment takes us to Natalia and Ginel’s Romanian village, which adds further context to their predicament. There, the value of these paintings seems even more absurd. Although their life there is difficult, it is their home, and Mihai manages to make the family icons seem much more precious than any Monet. The Bucharest police get involved, and Mungiu finds much humour in the hierarchy of respectability between the Dutch man, the Bucharest officers and the Romanian villagers they are pursuing, with the policemen telling the gallery owner that “you might not agree, but we are ‘we’ with you, and [the robbers] are ‘they.’” These humorous touches help alleviate a bleak picture of continued, if evolving, exploitation between nations, yet they also make Traffic more true to life – survival is a matter of sweat and tears, but it is also about knowing how and when to laugh at the unfairness of the world.

Traffic is a Romanian-Belgian-Dutch co-production, and was produced by Mindset Productions, Lunanime, Bastide Films, and Les Films du Fleuve. Its international sales are handled by SBS Films International.