It's been said that nostalgia can be a wonderful—or horrible—thing; perhaps both. In the new Romanian picture OCTAV, currently breaking box office records, the legendary Marcel Iures is a penniless octogenarian who faces a personal reckoning upon unexpectedly revisiting the formative experiences of his youth.
In a mood piece that says it is never too late to go home again, director Serge Ioan Celebidachi (Taming the Apex) has fashioned a contemplative, thoughtful picture charting mysterious, dual evocations of childhood and late-life, and how they are inextricably linked.
Picture opens when penniless Octav (Iures) regains possession of the pastoral country home of his youth, a longtime state-owned property, and returns to the countryside with the intention to quickly unload the property to new buyers. But the past, which comes flooding back, simply will not allow a speedy transaction.
Upon arriving at the remote manor, two ghosts of another time almost immediately return; one material, the other not. While Octav receives a warm welcome from caretaker Spiridon (the great Victor Rebengiuc), his adolescent confidant, he's surprised to be visited by the dream-like visage of a long-forgotten first love, Ana (Alessia Tofan), a vision of childhood innocence and invitation to return to a simpler time. For aging Octav, reconciliation is in order, but first he must revisit a handful of formative experiences.
These include the re-emergence of Octav's childhood band of friends, and sure-handed Celebidachi captures the games, routines and spirit of youthful zeal in a manner reminiscent of Bergman's classic FANNY & Alexander, delivering a portrait of childhood as an eternal playground, until it can no longer be. As it always is in classic period pieces, parental discord and the call of war are never far away, nor is loss of innocence.
That pivotal turning point arrives too soon with the untimely death of his beloved artist mother (Lia Bugnar), a celebrated painter, but not before she can imbue an important life lesson about the soul of an artist in a richly written scene suggesting a conversation Octav has attempted to make sense of across his long life.
Octav's father (Ioan Andrei Ionescu) is a notable pianist who treats both Octav and young Spiridon as equals in the house, an artist's enclave of sorts, complete with an elaborate music room adorned by string instruments. In a masterful late moment, father consoles son with a delicate monologue equating musical notes with the beats of a human life.
The poignant screenplay, co-written by James Olivier and Celebidachi, eschews traditional plotting and, like life, doesn't conform to the dictates of a three-act structure. Instead, it takes its time unfolding in unexpected ways, which include significant passages taking place inside Octav's memories and liberal crosscutting between eras, expertly woven by editor Mircea Olteanu. What Olivier and Celebidachi are getting at with OCTAV is the universal axiom that as far as we may go in life, we are defined by our early experiences and burying them, or perhaps moving past them, leaves us incomplete.
As Octav experiences sense memories and triggers—parental influences, lifelong friends, joys and sorrows—he arrives at scene of subtle truth, eloquently spoken in delicate scene of finality between adult and child. We can move forward, the screenplay tells us, but only if we know where we have been and what it has meant.
International star Iures, significantly aged for the role, has the challenging job of conveying Octav's inner life in the smallest of emotional beats. It is a quiet performance of subtle calibration and a less-is-more portrait giving voice to reflection and its relationship to wisdom gained. Watching Iures filter and re-filter Octav's life events in close-up is absorbing, and no easy task for any actor, delivering, in the smallest of expressions, the meaning of sometimes wordless scenes.
Executive producer Cristina Dobritoui and producer Adela Vrinceanu Celebidachi have mounted the handsome production in the sprawling Bucharest Film Studios and on location outside Câmpulung, near Romania's Carpathian Mountains. And while the picture largely confines the present-day action to Octav's home and its surrounding grounds, recesses of memory and imagination suggest a vastness to the environs.
And the great Italian DP Blasco Giurato's painterly 35mm compositions employ a shifting color palette evoking both the romance of adolescence and sobering realities of adulthood. Giruato, who knows a thing or two about rendering idyllic childhoods on screen (he lensed the Oscar-winning CINEMA PARADISO), polishes the picture's time frames and moods with alternating sheens of gloss and grit.
Culturally, OCTAV is a picture that attempts to recast the notion of the Romanian film as far more universal and less grim than recent outings from noted filmmaker Christian Mungui, who specializes in admittedly powerful yet bleak morality plays with no winners, and less hope. By contrast, OCTAV takes an accessibly humanist view of our universal experience and that of the Romanian people—we all live, feel, remember and move forward in life, and how we come to terms with the formative events we experience is what defines us, and connects us.
In a mood piece that says it is never too late to go home again, director Serge Ioan Celebidachi (Taming the Apex) has fashioned a contemplative, thoughtful picture charting mysterious, dual evocations of childhood and late-life, and how they are inextricably linked.
Picture opens when penniless Octav (Iures) regains possession of the pastoral country home of his youth, a longtime state-owned property, and returns to the countryside with the intention to quickly unload the property to new buyers. But the past, which comes flooding back, simply will not allow a speedy transaction.
Upon arriving at the remote manor, two ghosts of another time almost immediately return; one material, the other not. While Octav receives a warm welcome from caretaker Spiridon (the great Victor Rebengiuc), his adolescent confidant, he's surprised to be visited by the dream-like visage of a long-forgotten first love, Ana (Alessia Tofan), a vision of childhood innocence and invitation to return to a simpler time. For aging Octav, reconciliation is in order, but first he must revisit a handful of formative experiences.
These include the re-emergence of Octav's childhood band of friends, and sure-handed Celebidachi captures the games, routines and spirit of youthful zeal in a manner reminiscent of Bergman's classic FANNY & Alexander, delivering a portrait of childhood as an eternal playground, until it can no longer be. As it always is in classic period pieces, parental discord and the call of war are never far away, nor is loss of innocence.
That pivotal turning point arrives too soon with the untimely death of his beloved artist mother (Lia Bugnar), a celebrated painter, but not before she can imbue an important life lesson about the soul of an artist in a richly written scene suggesting a conversation Octav has attempted to make sense of across his long life.
Octav's father (Ioan Andrei Ionescu) is a notable pianist who treats both Octav and young Spiridon as equals in the house, an artist's enclave of sorts, complete with an elaborate music room adorned by string instruments. In a masterful late moment, father consoles son with a delicate monologue equating musical notes with the beats of a human life.
The poignant screenplay, co-written by James Olivier and Celebidachi, eschews traditional plotting and, like life, doesn't conform to the dictates of a three-act structure. Instead, it takes its time unfolding in unexpected ways, which include significant passages taking place inside Octav's memories and liberal crosscutting between eras, expertly woven by editor Mircea Olteanu. What Olivier and Celebidachi are getting at with OCTAV is the universal axiom that as far as we may go in life, we are defined by our early experiences and burying them, or perhaps moving past them, leaves us incomplete.
As Octav experiences sense memories and triggers—parental influences, lifelong friends, joys and sorrows—he arrives at scene of subtle truth, eloquently spoken in delicate scene of finality between adult and child. We can move forward, the screenplay tells us, but only if we know where we have been and what it has meant.
International star Iures, significantly aged for the role, has the challenging job of conveying Octav's inner life in the smallest of emotional beats. It is a quiet performance of subtle calibration and a less-is-more portrait giving voice to reflection and its relationship to wisdom gained. Watching Iures filter and re-filter Octav's life events in close-up is absorbing, and no easy task for any actor, delivering, in the smallest of expressions, the meaning of sometimes wordless scenes.
Executive producer Cristina Dobritoui and producer Adela Vrinceanu Celebidachi have mounted the handsome production in the sprawling Bucharest Film Studios and on location outside Câmpulung, near Romania's Carpathian Mountains. And while the picture largely confines the present-day action to Octav's home and its surrounding grounds, recesses of memory and imagination suggest a vastness to the environs.
And the great Italian DP Blasco Giurato's painterly 35mm compositions employ a shifting color palette evoking both the romance of adolescence and sobering realities of adulthood. Giruato, who knows a thing or two about rendering idyllic childhoods on screen (he lensed the Oscar-winning CINEMA PARADISO), polishes the picture's time frames and moods with alternating sheens of gloss and grit.
Culturally, OCTAV is a picture that attempts to recast the notion of the Romanian film as far more universal and less grim than recent outings from noted filmmaker Christian Mungui, who specializes in admittedly powerful yet bleak morality plays with no winners, and less hope. By contrast, OCTAV takes an accessibly humanist view of our universal experience and that of the Romanian people—we all live, feel, remember and move forward in life, and how we come to terms with the formative events we experience is what defines us, and connects us.