The Unsettling World of Reconstruction: A State-Driven Pantomime in Communist Romania

In 1968, Romanian filmmaker Lucian Pintilie crafted a peculiar and unconventional political satire that begins with a small group of individuals but eventually unfurls into a dreamlike scene with hundreds of non-actors swarming across the screen. The film, based on a novel by Horia Patrascu, tells the story of two drunken, hapless youths who get into a brawl at a riverside cafe and are forced to re-enact the event in detail for a solemn instructional film produced by the communist party authorities.

The two protagonists, Vuica (played by George Mihaita) and Nicu (played by Vladimir Gaitan), are expected to redeem their offense and expunge their sins by recreating their lives in the service of state-sponsored morality. The film is a blend of sophistication and crude official clumsiness, with the state humiliating two young people in a heavy-handed and pedantic manner. The inefficiency and incompetence of the authorities are on full display, as nothing gets done for hours despite the fact that the filming has to be finished before an expected crowd of football supporters shows up.

The punishment-slash-redemption involved in this "reconstruction" is not just for the public but also to compel the culprits to look at what they have done and confront it in detail. Pintilie's film is an unsettling incident of surveillance, scrutiny, and intimate control, an attempt to invade the consciousness of the wrongdoer. It is the exact opposite of BBC TV's Crimewatch, which reconstructs unsolved crimes to catch the criminals; this is to further mortify the malefactors and anyone in the audience tempted to do something similar. Film is punishment; film is cruelty. Reconstruction is akin to Powell's Peeping Tom and Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, this is the postwar communist enlightenment: not an assault upon or imprisonment of the defendant's body, but an incursion into his mind.

Pintilie shows that these state-sanctioned filmmakers demand documentary realism, with grimly ironic and yet blackly comic results. The film is a strange and unsettling commentary on the power of the state and the consequences of its actions, and it remains a relevant and thought-provoking work even today. "Reconstruction" is available on Klassiki from 19 June.