Film

The first half of this bleakly funny slice-of-life follows three inhabitants of a drab Romanian hamlet—an alcoholic history professor (Sapdaru), a doddering pensioner preparing to play Santa Claus in a Christmas pageant (Andreescu) and the pompous moderator of a local TV call-in show (Corban)—through a gray day in late December.

In the second part of the film, the three nobodies gather in a makeshift TV studio to discuss the following topic in real time: “Was there, or was there not, a revolution in our town?” The question boils down to the issue of whether demonstrations in the town square began before or after 12:08pm on December 22, 1989—the moment when the news broke that the communist despot Nicolae Ceausescu had been ousted.

The old codger, whose credentials as a witness are never explained, ducks the question to concentrate on making little paper boats. The boozy academic blusteringly asserts that he and a small band of compatriots took their stand before they knew it was safe to do so, but his testimony is stingingly refuted by a succession of abusive callers.

Though it’s a walk in the park compared to last year’s Romanian art-house darling, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Bucharest taps into similar veins of misanthropy, fatalism and humanistic melancholy. It’s just our kind of bummer.