Sergiu Nicolaescu vs Edward D Wood jr.

First of all, who the fuck is S.Nicolaescu? Considered the worst or the best Romanian director of all times, he begin his career as an engineer so much in love with cheap American gangster movies that he started to make them. You can still observe in his old movies from 1960s and 1970s the good-old-engineer eye for perfect imitation. He loved moral stories and also big Hollywood epics. He found his way to support his projects by the Communist Party in charge, of course with some compromises, which are better seen in his later nationalist movies, following the political lines of the dominant discourse. This is enough for introduction, I am sure there is a lot of stuff on Sergiu online, if you want to get into his plastic universe. What I want to write more about is his last movie, from 2008, The Survivor. He manages to resurrect one of his dear characters from the 1970s, a leftist police officer that fights the interwar gangsters. Now the setting is changed, the police officer escapes the communist hell from the 1970s and ends up in Prague where he plays Russian roulette for survival. All the good-old characters are there, a wonderful occasion for our ragged hero to remember: Sergiu brings in all the possible clichés of an afternoon action American movie to support some local bias, anti-Semitism (the evil Jew that hunts his memories, the Jew that has no consciousness when he destroys lives, it’s all for the money, get it, right?), racism (the musicians are toys in the hand of the evil Jew, they are “the sentimental gypsies”, the one “good” and faithful Roma is a small thief, a motif for friendly plain racist jokes with no motivation in the script, just for Sergiu’s own racist pleasure I guess), sexism (women have no lines, they are undressed and killed, insisting on cock-teasing details) and direct assholism. Sergiu’s success at the box office is given by a nostalgia for state socialist symbols that lead the way for some contemporary bigotism. One last thing to mention: the script for The Survivor won the money from the Romanian state institution for cinema when the script for 4,3,2 by Mungiu was only on the 4^th place.

Nicolaescu and Wood share same hysterical obsession for their self representation in their movies: it is all about them, their current age when the movie is made, their bodily portrait, their small obsessions and fetishes. Ed Wood became a cult hero in the eyes of contemporary yuppies as something extreme: “he is the worst”, a source for humor, without paying attention at his extreme subversion of Hollywood cinematography, narrations and characters. By comparing the worst Romanian director to the worst director of all times, there are some significant differences to point out: while Edward D. Wood jr. brings forth nonlinear scripts that sound crazy, his Angora fetish, his homosocial buddies and personal drags, Sergiu comes with a strong reiteration of the most conservative version of the status quo with all its deadly elements. They are both sincere and they both talk about themselves with ridiculous cinematic poetics: that marks the whole distinction.

But more about Eddie in future posts, his book Hollywood Rat Race is on my very short list to be read.