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Bookmark this pageAurora (2010)
Director: Cristi Puiu
Movie review
From Time Out Online
Reviewed at the 2010 Cannes Film FestivalWith just two fiction features (the second being the Cannes prize-winning ‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’) and one short, Romania’s Cristi Puiu had already established himself among the most promising of Europe’s younger filmmakers. Now, with his bold third feature, he proves that he is one of the most distinctive artists working in cinema anywhere today.
‘Aurora’ is not exactly an easy movie; it runs for three hours and covers about one and a half days in the life of a man we first see about to get out of bed with a woman; she might be his wife, though the way the man lurks in the shadows when a girl appears calling for her mummy suggests we shouldn’t be too sure. Indeed, throughout the film there remains a considerable degree of ambiguity, even mystery, to this man’s actions and motives as he wanders and drives about the city, always watchfully; who is he, where does he live, what is his relationship to the various people he encounters, and why is he fixing up that rifle?
It’s a film of endless questions, then, and only in the last few minutes are some (but far from all) of them answered. Whatever else you may read about the film, it’s not so much about the act of killing as about what there might be in any of us that might just move us, in very particular circumstances, to kill. The elliptical, mostly dialogue-free narrative simply follows the man around, observing his gait, his gaze, his unconscious gestures; it is left to the director’s own extraordinarily eloquent (if unusually taciturn) performance to suggest the complex tangle of emotions and thoughts going through the clearly perturbed protagonist’s mind.
‘Aurora’ will not be to everyone’s taste, but it is undoubtedly the work of an audacious, intelligent writer-director (and, at least for now, actor) who’s both ready and very able to deal with areas of human experience of which many other filmmakers seem barely to be aware. It was the inescapable fact of mortality in ‘Mr Lazarescu’; here it is the pain and confusion of just being alive. And Puiu’s special approach to the realist aesthetic ensures that ‘Aurora’ rings unusually true. Superb stuff.
Author: Geoff Andrew
Time Out Online 2010 Cannes Film Festival
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