If anyone has been missing Kornél Mundruczó’s Eastern psychedelic miserabilism – now that he works mostly in the West – such as that found in his earlier works like Tender Son - The Frankenstein Project [+lee también:
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entrevista: Kornél Mundruczó
entrevista: Orsi Tóth
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ficha de la película], just shown at the Kino Pavasaris Film Festival, within the SMART7 competition. The film is about a single mother trying to steer her adolescent son through life, even though she seems to have lost track of her own. The deserted setting, reminiscent of Delta, unfolds amid poor Roma communities in the Danubian region – a landscape steeped in loneliness and abandonment – and, reminiscent of Tender Son, albeit more loosely, it deals with a father’s absence and the broken bonds within a tense parent-child relationship. The action drifts along slowly and painstakingly, while a layer of dust from neglect, coating the entire film (alongside a layer of boredom), clings to the viewer’s senses.

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The life of Lavinia (Mihaela Subtirica) is a mess that she keeps trying to piece back together while dreaming of a beautiful house for herself and her 13-year-old son, Dani (Stefan Costea), as they live in her grandfather’s half-ruined, barrack-like dwelling. Driven out by Dani’s father and, more recently, by her Roma lover, Marian, “the Gypsy” (Vasile Pavel-Digudai, already featured in similar roles in other Romanian films such as Soldiers. Story from Ferentari [+lee también:
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entrevista: Dawid Ogrodnik
entrevista: Ivana Mladenovic
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entrevista: Monica Stan, George Chiper…
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An artist, university professor and researcher with an affinity for ethnography, Andreea Cristina Borțun likely knows a great deal about the impoverished communities along the Romanian Danube, but can identify little, if at all, with their fate and way of life from her investigative desk. This may well explain the detached gaze, the overall even rhythm and the predominantly dark tones — what can one really know about the nuances of a life not directly experienced? — which ultimately convey an all-encompassing sense of indifference. Professional actress Mihaela Subtirica also looks pretty lost in her task of embodying an underprivileged outcast of a woman with an emotional register that remains unclear even to those who created her character, so her acting strategy is mostly to stare listlessly in the scenes where she isn’t screaming in despair.

Nevertheless, A River’s Gaze is just the first part of a trilogy “on love in the rural”, observed from a safe urban setting. Hopefully, in her next endeavours, the director will dare to trust the instincts of more non-professional actors to breathe life into her otherwise sterilely conceived characters, who struggle to elicit empathy.

A River’s Gaze was produced by Romania’s Atelier de Film in co-production with Avanpost, France’s Films de Force Majeure and Slovenia’s Perfo Production.