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Tales from the Golden Age (2009)
Director: Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Höfer
Movie review
From Time Out London
It’s a frustrating case of individual triumph cancelling out collective cohesion in this sporadically enjoyable, if tonally mismatched, anthology of five short films, each intent on skewering the political corruption that set in during the final 15 years of the Ceaucescu regime in Romania (touted as ‘The Golden Age’). The film feeds its tall tales (or ‘legends’) through an absurdist comic mangle in order to explore the cruel ironies bubbling beneath the surface of party policy. While the hits far outweigh the misses, it’s still something of a struggle to ingest a ‘would you believe it?’ funny such as ‘The Legend of the Party Photographer’ (which hilariously riffs on the draconian censorship of state newspaper Scinteia) when followed by the more melancholy likes of ‘The Legend of the Chicken Driver’ (about a bashful trucker who instigates a poultry scam to impress a woman). Impressive, then, but really uneven.Author: David Jenkins
Time Out London Issue 2045, Oct 29 – Nov 4 2009
Cast & crew
Director: Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Höfer
Cast: Razvan Marculescu, Constantin Popescu, Cristian Mungiu
Genre(s): Drama
Duration: 131 mins
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