12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania)

By Jay Kuehner

If Cristi Puiu’s quotidian epic The Death of Mr Lazerescu (2005) merits the declaration of a Romanian new wave, then Corneliu Porumboiu’s modest debut, the Cannes Camera d’Or-winning 12:08 East of Bucharest, stakes out the studiedly minimalist end of the scale; it’s no less of an achievement, just a different species of the same genus. Where Puiu’s long day’s gurney into night is indebted to ER re-runs and Eric Rohmer, Porumboiu’s droll evocation of the Romanian revolution owes something to Jarmusch. Divergence of influences apart, it’s perhaps telling that both films take as their starting point a most inauspicious figure: a drunkard on a couch.

12:08 begins in montage, as the colourless winter streets of a small town—presumably Porumboiu’s hometown of Vaslui—flicker the last of their lamplight at the coming of dawn. Cut to disheveled Manescu (Ion Sapdaru), a bored history teacher with an unpaid tab at the local bar, who is woken from his night on the couch by a phone call from an acquaintance, Jderescu (Teo Corban), a nagging television talk show host in need of guests for a program on the anniversary of the revolution. Manescu is hardly primetime material: debriefed of his previous night’s antics, he can’t fathom how an ugly tree found its way into his kitchen, or why he woke half the neighborhood belting out the national anthem. The only thing he is certain of is having insulted the town’s lone Chinese merchant.

Jderescu, meanwhile, comes across like Charlie Rose as imagined by the Czech new wave. His attempts to solicit guests are met with general indifference, prompting his personable ”fuck you’s” to various answering machines. If his less-than-decorous approach is parodied as a post-communist form of public relations, it’s in keeping with the film’s ironic sense of nationalism, which finds Romanians easily unimpressed by each other. Porumboiu’s despoiled Romania is at eternal cross-purposes: Jderescu’s vacuous armchair wisdom corresponds less-than-ideally with an in-house orchestra who’ve taken up Latin music, a young cameraman with auteurist inclinations, and a female co-host doubling as Jderescu’s mistress, who dismisses his specious project of revolutionary remembrance. “What’s all the fuss about the revolution?” she wonders. “No one cares anymore.” In Jderescu’s defense, his response might well be Porumboiu’s own: “What do you want me to do?” he retorts, “programs on inflation? Or films about gypsy music?”

Shoring up Jderescu’s sad lineup is Piscoci (Mirceau Andreescu), a curmudgeonly but sweet white-haired grandpa and retired Santa Claus who not only fleshes out the film’s comic incongruity but also acts as its loose centre of moral gravity. First seen slapping his radio for better reception, the ambling Piscoci is naively lured to his door by pranking kids setting off fireworks. (It’s one of the film’s recurring, innocent gags that, like much of its seemingly incidental content, will accrue broader implications.) Begrudgingly coaxed out of retirement for one more Santa gig, Piscoci is summoned at the last minute for his testimonial of the day when, 16 years prior, the Ceausescu regime was overthrown. Driving to the studio in Jderescu’s diesel-scented Mercedes, the two men have a conversation which, while far too slight for allegorical interpretation, resonates in the context of the film’s quasi-polemical latter half. Recalling a childhood visit to Piscoci-as-Santa, Jderescu laughingly remembers how a botched gift led to the revelation of Santa’s true identity. “We all make mistakes,” Piscoci says. “To err is human.” It’s a nicely etched if almost offhand scene, except that the little story alludes to memory, appearances, deception, and, most importantly, forgiveness. In the context of a deposed, tyrannical government, Piscoci’s admission of a forgivable mistake seems to suggest a kind of innocent, alternative history that never was, the sort that Porumboiu wants to quietly recover.

Abandoning the gently divergent strands of its first half, the remainder of 12:08 is devoted to a single, wonderfully sustained deadpan gag, both visual and narrative, that unfolds in real time and strands the hapless trio in a call-in nightmare. The show’s key question, ardently debated, is framed as the film’s rhetorical one: namely, was there a revolution in our town? Or did citizens merely storm the town square in the fateful moments after 12:08, when the deposed Ceausescu fled by helicopter? Manescu seizes the opportunity to insinuate himself into history with his righteous yet characteristically aloof claims of battling against the Securitate, but a local caller is convinced that he merely drank his way through the revolution at the corner bar. Asked to remove his hat and refrain from drinking, the bored Piscoci folds paper hats as he struggles to stay in the picture—literally, since the amateur cameraman zooms and focuses at will to spice up the drama. (“Now would be a nice time for a close-up,” intones the now-resigned Jderescu, as the camera nods in the direction of his feet.)

This quietly bravura set-piece manages to be narratively torpid and aesthetically flat, but nevertheless conceptually rich; it’s a sublime metaphor for the uses of history, how people make it as much as it makes people, and how received narratives often entail multiple and conflicting views. As such, 12:08’s extended “joke” offers a rather dynamic model of democratic values, although Jderescu’s cut-rate forum is hardly its most flattering expression. That Porumboiu stages the “action” on live television is surely not coincidental, as impromptu broadcasts from the seized television stations relayed the progress of the revolution, up to and including Ceausescu and wife’s bloody end. 

Porumboiu’s black humour is ultimately more bittersweet than biting. He’s less interested in mining the kitsch left in the wake of the communist schism (Good Bye Ceausescu! this isn’t) than in disclosing those everyday minutiae that endure beyond historical turning points. If Porumboiu is generationally linked to the ignorance of the boyish cameraman, he’s sympathetically aligned with old Piscoci’s poetics. As the televised debate devolves into blame and shame, Piscoci’s own digressive reverie proves the most faithful. When the revolution hit, he was busy trying to win back the affection of his wife by offering her three magnolias plucked from the botanical garden, when Laurel and Hardy was suddenly interrupted by a beseiged Ceausescu promising a paltry wage increase; thinking the raise might save his marriage, Piscoci was disappointed when the tide of revolution swept the dictator out of power. Though he only took to the streets after the fact, Piscoci provides the film with its most affecting instance of the melancholy of resistance: “One makes whatever revolution one can, each in their own way.”

For Porumboiu, this means telling whatever revolution one has, with one exception: No heroics, please! The film’s coda echoes the opening montage, as the streetlights sputter into life against the snowy night. It’s calm and beautiful, just like the revolution as remembered by the film’s cameraman (and Porumboiu’s stand-in). If 12:08 appears to sell out the soul of Romanian history, it’s worth considering that, when the regime collapsed, 14-year-old Porumboiu was playing ping-pong at home. Which makes this comedy, the director’s own small contribution to history, rather conscionable.

—Jay Kuehner

12:08 East of Bucharest

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