The Golden Age of Dictatorship

Wherein we go back a decade and spend five-and-a-half hours focused on the final days of Nicolae Ceausescu's iron-fisted reign in Romania:

TALES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE (2011) (B+) - Cristian Mungiu ("4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days," "Beyond the Hills," "Graduation") writes and curates a light-hearted remembrance of the final days behind Romania's Iron Curtain. He takes Romanian urban legends and plays them out in an anthology of six short films (the first four are under 20 minutes; the final two are a little longer than a half hour each). Mungiu wrote the scripts and shares directing duties with four others.

Many of the stories involve variations on the communist era grift. A town of bumblers prepares for an official visit from dignitaries, with two bureaucrats meddling on the day before the visit. A photographer for a Communist Party newspaper must alter a photo to make Ceausescu look taller and less deferential next to the French leader. A police officer is gifted with a live pig and he must figure out how to discreetly kill it in his apartment. Two young adults pose as water inspectors in order to collect glass bottles that they trade in for cash.

The focus is on ingenuity and the banality of a populace resigned to coping with an authoritarian regime. The humor is dry and wry. The stories usually end with an ironic twist, mildly unahppy endings. Try it in two sittings

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY  OF NICOLAE CEAUSESCU (2011) (B) - Andrei Ujica shuns talking heads and narration in favor of raw archival footage, taking a curatorial approach to Frederick Wiseman's fly-on-the-wall documentary style. Events are understood in context. There is some fat in this three-hour endeavor, but extended scenes -- a lot of oration and applause at party meetings -- create a grinding sense of the numbing feeling of life under authoritarianism.

Ujica starts with Ceausescu's rise to the top in the mid-'60s as a compromise choice as party leader. The second hour segues into the '70s, as Ceausescu seeks to play a role on the world stage, beefing up the economy and playing ball with western powers. We see him getting the VIP treatment from the United States and Britain (the full royal welcome), as well as from North Korea and China. Nearly halfway through, the film bursts into color from dreary black-and-white. Oddly, his 60th birthday celebration in 1981 segues awkwardly back five years (and back to black-and-white).

Ujica bookends the film with crude video footage of the 1989 show trial of Ceausescu and his wife (where they go out bickering), but we do not see their execution or aftermath. The film drones methodically -- some fast-forwarding is useful -- and that's the point.

BONUS TRACK
For some reason, the Ceausescu documentary uses Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma's version of "Hush Little Baby (Mockingbird)" completely out of context: