“It’s like a movie,” boasts a man as he is served lobster in a restaurant. It really looks like a movie in this Romanian ad. But a very bad one. And it will remain the same for the next 110 minutes or so.
The playful film entitled Eight Postcards from Utopia, which will be presented at this year’s Ji.hlava documentary film festival, tells the story of post-socialist Romania only with the help of striking and hilariously naive advertising spots.
The bespectacled guy yells hysterically, “Now it comes in a liter!” And waving a bottle of Pepsi Cola. Another vehement scream follows, rhyming in the original with the previous sentence: “Killer of commies?!”
It seems that the Romanians didn’t even need Czech Soda-type satire. Judging by the advertising aesthetics, the 90s there were even wilder than the Czech one. The leading Romanian director Radu Jude, whose film puns on the past and present of his native country are also familiar to the local audience, put together a unique collage about his native country with the philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz. As the title Eight Postcards from Utopia suggests, it really is a collection of chapters from a very strange world.
Especially for those who remember the Czech 90s, who have a lot of domestic advertisements etched deep in their memory, this can be a fun probe into the first free decade in the neighboring post-socialist space. In something similar, in something far distant.
Who is the barbarian here?
Forty-seven-year-old Radu Jude, like many leading Romanian creators, likes to delve into the history of his country. In the black and white film Aferim! from 2015 he uniquely varied western procedures. The heroes of this grotesque fresco travel through the desolate landscape of Wallachia in the 19th century and come across representatives of all kinds of local nations and religions, as well as a lot of prejudices.
Radu Jude won the main prize at the Berlinale in 2021. | Photo: Reuters
The protagonists of the black comedy with the long title I don’t care if we go down in history as barbarians reconstruct the battle from 1941, when the Romanian army committed ethnic cleansing in Odessa. It is again a humorous, but also an immense view of one’s own history.
With the penultimate feature film Smolný pich aka Pitomý porno, for which he won the main prize of the Golden Bear at the Berlinale festival, the creator turned to the present. The offbeat satire about a teacher whose erotic pranks go viral explored today’s kinds of prejudice.
All these slides were played. In the latest, Radu Jude explores Romanian “barbarism” using non-original material. Purely through the selection and humorous editing of advertisements, they can similarly cut to the living. The document is divided into eight chapters, which loosely touch on history, the language of money, the technological revolution or the hidden poetry of these consumer spots. It all adds up to a picture of a wild-faced country into which capitalism has invaded in a rumbling Oltcit car. Sometimes literally.
“Bucurescul newspapers, read before they go bankrupt,” reads one slogan after a white oltcit skids to a stop next to a stack of copies like a cheap crime scene. It’s a really remarkable type of marketing, almost like it fell out of Czech soda. At the same time, its creators, led by Petr Čtvrtníček, came up with sharp parodies of advertisements for washing powders, which they wash in the 1940s and really finish washing. With our Romanian colleagues, we sometimes feel that self-parody already occurred during the filming of the original spot.
The film Eight postcards from Utopia will introduce this year’s Jihlava festival. | Video: Saga Film
Beer as a tradition
Some of the ads deliberately resemble dumb grotesque, with others it is hard to tell where the intention ends and the guileless naivety begins. It’s often funny anyway. For example, when a woman with a wooden four-wheeler pulled by a mule buys old computer equipment and people throw “four-eighths” computers and other prehistoric devices onto the car.
History parades before our eyes from the Middle Ages to coupon privatization. And sometimes they even bring self-deprecating sighs like in an ad for a gas station chain: “Maybe we’ll never be like the Germans. But if we don’t start behaving civilized, then who will?”
The film Eight Postcards from Utopia consists of commercials only. | Photo: MFDF Ji.hlava
This almost existential pessimism is replaced by a frenzied beer ad from the time of the financial crisis in 2008: “Good stuff stays good even in bad times,” sounds from the screen, while people pour golden juice from two-liter PET bottles.
Even in the later episodes, the alcohol commercials don’t go too far around the hot mess. In another, he proudly reads: “We have a tradition in drinking beer. I learned it from my grandfather and my father. I follow the tradition!”
Alcohol also features in Romanian commercials for completely different products. “I’ve brought lunch,” the craftsman bellows with a bottle of wine and glasses in hand. Then they pour together, a bucket of paint serves them instead of a table. Here, even the “greatest” Czech, who considers beer to be a drink of ordinary consumption and a national treasure, gets a little nervous, whether it is a little over the line after all. The movie gets even sharper when the “cereal-based soul warmer” arrives. Needless to say, this product is not intended for breakfast for young people either.
Most advertisements have an aggressive nature, as if they want to get straight into the viewers’ heads immediately and without embellishments. Taste and taste, actors and non-actors, aesthetics not aesthetics, what is important is action and an attack on emotions.
In one spot, a team of tie-breakers invades a school and goes straight for the kids’ snacks: “To survive in this country, you need muscles first and brains second!” exclaims one. Rather than an ad for healthy, chemical-free products, it’s an ad for the earth, which either suffers from a strange self-reflection even in this genre with no artistic ambitions, or – which is more likely – outright and willingly shoots itself in the foot.
Of course, we don’t always know the context, authors don’t release one ad after another, they often leave only fragments to communicate with each other at a fast pace. And they brought a fun mix of unwanted existentialism with bizarre snippets and period testimonies.
However, if watching this experimental grotesque someone gets the feeling that Romanians are really a bit barbaric compared to the Czechs, it is good to remember which country has been winning the leading film festivals from Berlin to Cannes for the last two decades. Our goal for now is to at least make it to the main competitions there.
Film
Eight postcards from Utopia
Directed by: Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz
The film will be presented at this year’s Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.