Reconstruction (1968)

[StevePulaski]

Reconstruction (1968)
Directed by: Lucian Pintilie

Rating: ★★★
NOTE: This film was recommended to me by Brian Risselada for "Steve Pulaski Sees It."

Lucian Pintilie's Reconstruction is among one of the most unique films I've seen when it comes to inciting social commentary about an abusive, authoritarian society, in addition to being a film incorporating some original and layered sound and visual aesthetics, as well. It's a film centered around a filmmaking crew, who, instructed by the Romanian government, are working on an anti-alcohol/alcoholism video involving the same two students who got into a fight after having a bit too much to drink. Despite the fact that the crew are working on a mountain near a river, a series of different figures and locations are shown to give us a feeling that other areas are nearby that are just as effected by some sort of authoritarian interference as the folks tasked with shooting this film.

At various different points of the film, we see such things as an industrial railyard, rural life with an older woman attending to geese, an urban locale, and even a beach showcasing a more tropical atmosphere. Pintilie is also sure that during these deviations in setting, we don't always hear appropriate sounds pertaining to the location, which allows him and his crew of sound editors to toy with the different regions and create asynchronous background noise for many of these scenes. The result is quite unforeseeable, as even more established filmmakers don't always know how to adequately implement this nor do they even find themselves taking those kinds of risks.

Also implemented are a variety of montages, both conventional and dialectal, so seamlessly crafted they'd make Sergei Eisenstein blush. While Eisenstein incorporated those revolutionary cinematic tactics to instill some sort of propaganda or grandiose message about government control, Pintilie metaphorically finds himself ripping up celluloid in order to give us something welcomed and different in Reconstruction. Pintilie works to establish the use of montage and jump-cuts in a way that intersects beautifully with the recurring theme of a manipulative ruling class that shows his prose as a director rather than a radical with a camera.

Where Jean-Luc Godard radically rebelled against aesthetic conventions of French traditionalism in the 1960's, Pintilie seems to subtly manipulate to the point where he tricks you into thinking you're simply watching another film until you really zero in and notice that the aesthetics have played you. Where Godard altered and chopped up a conventional narrative, Pintilie alters in post-production and creates a fabulous film rebelling against authority, working under an unfair regime, and many more things I'm not quite sure I adequately understand or can summarize. What I can say, however, is that Reconstruction is a curious, almost fully subversive, work of cinema.

Starring: George Constantin, Emil Botta, George Mihaita, and Vladimir Gaitan. Directed by: Lucian Pintilie.