A drama of despair plays out in a remote village, as a debt-ridden father is mortified to discover his son is gay
ere is a self-laceratingly painful tale of repression and denial in a remote Romanian village in the Danube delta, directed by Emanuel Parvu.
The drama concerns a careworn guy, Dragoi , who owes money to a local tough guy and is badly behind with the debt. Then he discovers that his 17-year-old son Adi , the apple of his eye – whom he is planning to send to military school next year, and whom he fondly imagines to be dating a local girl – has been badly beaten up by the money-lender’s sons. With icy rage, Dragoi takes this to be the man’s unforgivably violent way of demanding his money.
But the moneylenders’ sons themselves claim with chilling moralism that they did this because they saw Adi kissing a male Bucharest tourist outside a disco. The local cop is entirely happy therefore to let the matter pass, believing in fact that it is Adi who has committed the offence. A pompous local priest is prevailed upon by Adi’s distraught mother to carry out a kind of anti-gay exorcism with Adi bound and gagged while priest and parents solemnly chant prayers over him with lit candles.
Adi’s rage and humiliation unfolds in parallel with his father’s. The older man had already been ground down by his failure to pay the debt. Yet the film shows that the thought that Adi’s beating had something to do with the loan, however enraging, did in fact offer Dragoi a salve to wounded pride. There was almost a tragic nobility in being the hardworking debtor whose innocent son was beaten up, two-against-one, on the order of a petty money-grubbjng coward.
There are acid touches in the screenplay. The police officer’s doltish deputy greedily avails himself of the snacks laid out by the moneylender when the police visit him at home. Inevitably, the cop himself yearns for Romania’s good old days: “At least Ceaușescu’s canals stopped the rivers from silting up…” he grumbles. There is an oblique power in the way that Adi himself hardly ever speaks in the movie – not about himself, not about his feelings, not about his identity.
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