‘The Oak’: A Post-Communist Pinwheel

Playing the final days of Romanian communism as frenzied farce, Lucian Pintilie’s “The Oak” is about in a world so despoiled a Hieronymus Bosch panorama may appear bucolic by comparability.

First proven in 1992, some three years after the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his spouse had been executed and a yr after a brand new structure changed single-party rule, “The Oak” has been restored and revived for per week at Film Forum. Ensuing many years have scarcely mitigated its energy.

Following the loss of life of her father, a onetime colonel within the secret police, the matted and seemingly demented Nela (Maia Morgenstern) departs the squalid Bucharest condominium they shared and, carrying dad’s ashes in a jar of Nescafé, makes her technique to Copsa Mica, the Transylvanian city the place she has been employed to show.

The place is a citadel of air pollution — industrial and in any other case. Nela is sexually assaulted by a gang of drunken employees. After she is dumped in a hospital mattress (its earlier occupant unceremoniously relocated to the ground), Nela meets a kindred soul in Mitica (Razvan Vasilescu), a surgeon equally despatched to the Transylvanian again of past. Equally unrestrained, Mitica eschews bribes and bodily assaults his superiors, typically with a set grin. The pair crew up in a scattershot, anti-authoritarian conspiracy of two.

As wildly impulsive Nela, Morgenstern offers a efficiency no much less anarchic than the film. (It’s a minor irony of cinema historical past that this whirlwind actress could be finest identified for her somber portrayal of Jesus’s mom in “The Passion of the Christ.”) She’s a lot enjoyable to look at that “The Oak” loses velocity when consideration shifts to her cohort.

Punctuated with sudden explosions, random mayhem, yelling, cursing, and ringing telephones, “The Oak” is impossibly busy in addition to extremely bleak. Trains stall, bridges flood, vehicles crash. The military is perpetually holding drills. The hospital doubles as a charnel home. Officials are ineffectual even of their self-dealing. Ordinary persons are pointlessly bellicose.

The film is typically exhausting however by no means boring. Indeed, the tempo is dizzying to the purpose of disorientation. “You can’t be sure which way is up,” Vincent Canby wrote in his evaluation in The Times, watching “The Oak” was like exploring “a house of horrors in an amusement park in space.”

Pintilie, who died in 2018, has been known as the godfather of the Romanian new wave — an instance for the proficient younger administrators who emerged within the early twentieth century. “The Oak” offered a template for the journey-to-the-end-of-the-night absurdism present in Cristi Puiu’s “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (2005) and Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (2007). In addition, “The Oak” pioneered a mode that is likely to be known as post-Communist grotesque, anticipating the Balkan tumult of the Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica’s “Underground” (1995), the frantic labyrinthine surrealism of Aleksei German’s “Khrustalyov, My Car!” (1998) and the political slapstick of Armando Iannucci’s “The Death of Stalin” (2017).

Unlike these three movies nevertheless, “The Oak” has the standard of a private exorcism. Made upon Pintilie’s return to Romania after years of self-imposed exile, it’s a work of bottled-up fury. The film’s mad vitality means that Pintilie, a few of whose earlier movies had been personally banned by Ceausescu, is pounding a stake via the dictator’s coronary heart the higher to bop on his grave.

The Oak

April 28 via May 4 at Film Forum in Manhattan, filmforum.org.