Cannes Review: Cristi Puiu’s Brilliant, Bustling, Bristling ‘Sieranevada’

As though edited through a concertina that inhales great gasps of real life and exhales gusts of drama, Romanian New Wave pioneer Cristi Puiu‘s “Sieranevada” is a wild ride despite being set for the majority of its near-three hour runtime in a tiny, cramped apartment. Unfolding over the course of one afternoon as an extended Romanian family crams into a poky flat bristling with cling-film covered dishes of food and simmering resentments, what seems beforehand like its punishing length is wholly justified by Puiu’s generously overlapping approach. With usually about six things going on in each deceptively clever handheld frame at once, the film never drags. Instead Puiu scoops up storylines and arguments and revelations armful by messy armful and the inexplicably titled “Sieranevada” becomes by turns pit-of-stomach-sad, flight-of-fancy funny and pin-in-heart moving. And never less than wincingly true in its deadpan acknowledgement of the beautiful absurdity of family life.

It also plays a few narrative tricks on us. Through a droll opening scene in which the laid-back Lary (Mimi Branescu) and his high-octane wife Laura (Catalina Moga) are involved in a traffic fracas while trying to drop their daughter off with Laura’s mother, we’re coached to believe that these will be our central characters. It’s reinforced when suddenly after that first long take, we switch to jittery jump-cuts inside the car as the couple argue with a painfully accurate tang of the ridiculous, about Disney princesses and what time the local supermarket closes. It seems impossible that two such instantly well-drawn characters can be anything but our leads, but then force-of-nature Laura is physically absent for half the film, while Lary is often relegated to the sidelines as other family members come into and out of focus.

Puiu indulges in no hand-holding as regards who is related to whom and how, but it doesn’t really matter if you understand that Sandra (Judith State) is Lary sister-in-law, being married to the other doctor of the family Gabi (Rolando Matsangos), while Simona (Simona Ghita), Sebi (Marin Grigore) and Cami (Ilona Brezoianu) are his cousins, and the first of our crying ladies is Ofelia (Ana Ciontea), his aunt and so on. The familial chemistry is effortlessly summoned by an absolutely incredible ensemble (not one false note across the entire run time from this many people is some sort of miracle) and one soon grows attuned to the minute changes in body language and behavior that denote the difference between brother and cousin, aunt and mother, husband and brother-in-law.

The occasion for this riotous reunion is the 40-day anniversary of the death of the family patriarch Emil. It’s to be marked by an odd ritual assembled by his wife Nusa (Dana Dogaru) Lary’s mother,  involving a priest, an empty suit of clothing, and a huge quantity of food, the consumption of which is tantalisingly promised, then postponed time and time and time again. The completion of the ritual is compromised by many intertwined factors: the tardiness of the priest, the arrival of cousin Cami with a passed-out junkie friend from Zagreb in tow (“The Croat has puked again” is a particularly cherishable line) and the uninvited presence of philandering uncle Tony (Sorin Medeleni), whose wife, (Nusa’s sister, if you’re keeping count) is the lachrymose Ofelia.

But while these strands simmer and occasionally boil over, really the film ebbs and flows in the chatter between all the various family members, which ranges from the banal to the personal to the political, as Sebi reveals himself to be a 9/11 truther (the film takes place shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris), Sandra has an upsetting row with diehard old communist Aunt Evelina (Tatiana Iekel) and Nusa berates Simona for buying the wrong size suit, and so on.

The ceaseless hubbub is a factor of extraordinary sound design. Exterior soundscapes are marked by offscreen bleating car alarms and idling car engines and interiors by raw revelations and recriminations counterpointed against tinny radio speakers from a farther room playing Ace of Base. But for the longest time, there’s one person never mentioned in all that noise: Emil. In fact the first time his name is heard is when it is being sung by the late-arrived priest and his backing quartet in an unexpected moment of pure sonic transcendence.

And even afterward, he is rarely referred to directly except in the one other quiet, non-confrontational moment (which naturally for Puiu occurs right after a spell of unexpected violence) when the normally calm, often giggly Lary is suddenly a sobbing wreck telling a childhood story about his flawed father. If you have experienced the loss of a parent yourself, this moment might very well deal a small but unmistakable solar plexus kick (I miss you, Dad).

So perhaps Emil is kind of the film’s structuring absence. But then something curious begins to happen — largely down to the wonderfully inventive eye-level handheld camerawork from DP Barbu Bălăsoiu. Because of the cramped conditions he often can do little more than swivel the lens on a single tight axis, but even then you become of aware of the camera making decisions about what to look at, poking in here, pulling back there, changing its mind. Perhaps Emil is not absent at all. Perhaps he’s there, he’s the camera, he’s us, looking in at the family he left with equal parts benevolence and irritation, from the position of an intimate, invisible outsider.

Puiu is no stranger to the comedy of realist absurdity, having submitted essentially a doctoral thesis on the subject (as well as a foundational work of the Romanian New Wave) with 2005’s “The Death of Mr Lazarescu.” But the despairing irony of that work, let alone the drier nihilism of his follow-up “Aurora” is replaced here by something sadder and simultaneously more hopeful. Ultimately, “Sieranevada” can be read as perhaps the most prosaic ghost story ever told, in which the ghost is simply the quietest guest in a loud room, hanging back watchfully and maybe sneaking the odd illicit cabbage roll as life — messy, bizarre, dramatic, beautiful life — goes on without him. [A-]

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