Tales from the Golden Age

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.