I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History As Barbarians (2019, dir: Radu Jude)
there's no use sitting on the fence
I’ve been meaning to say something worth saying about this film for some time, but it keeps eluding me. Maybe the film is bigger than me or my experience, or maybe I just can’t convey how much I like it without the writing collapsing into bathos.
I think the film says something true, albeit in a roundabout way: it is more in the vein of Walkabout and Mrs Dalloway and The Woodcutters and Lincoln in the Bardo than something more plain-spoken and tidy. I also don’t think a film like it could have been made in any of the traditional powerhouse nations of cinema.
I am no expert on Romanian or Greater Balkan cinema1 but I do know a few things about its critical standing over the last few years. There was a sharp rise in perceptions around three works that arrived in consecutive years from 2005: Christi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, and Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. Across these three films there are differences in tone: Porumboiu is a satirist, Mungiu a deep sincerist, while Puiu hovers somewhere between. All examine, to some extent, the Romanian condition as it co-exists with Communist doctrine, or as it suffers the morbid symptoms of trying to transplant global capitalism into the barely-functioning existing system.2
Though Porumboiu has recently rowed back to his bleak satiric best, all three have flirted with a sustained seriousness in their engagement with Romania’s ills. The point of exhaustion was Mungiu’s corruption drama Graduation3 - a prize-winner at Cannes, but in truth a doughy half-speed sludge that offered no feast for the eyes or mind. It was that worst of things for middlebrow film: worthy.
Enter Radu Jude. I’ve seen Aferim! (2015), Uppercase Print (2020), and I’ve got Jude’s recent COVID-affected and -referencing Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn (2021) lined up. From my limited perspective it feels like Radu Jude, who worked with Puiu, has revitalised the Romanian cinema with a series of works that take seriously the examination of self and nation that these films are known for, and injects an energy, humour, style, and a more foregrounded and unashamed cinematic intelligence that feels worthy of comparisons with other countries’ ‘new waves’.
I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians is the best of the lot. Barbarians presents the struggle of Mariana, a theatre director, in her attempt to stage a critical and heavily stylised re-enactment of the Romanian acquiescence with the Nazis in World War II. This holocaust of approximately 400000 Jews in lands that make up contemporary Ukraine and Moldova apparently remains quite the sore spot in Romanian public memory. Many citizens and avatars of the establishment prefer to think the Soviets as the real heels while Marshal Ion Antonescu suffers the afterlife of a mistreated hero.
Mariana’s difficulties in staging this city square performance arrive in different forms, many of which teeter on the the absurdist-comic line that serves to shield engagement from a direct line to the most brutal horrors of life. Let me copy from the script rather than give you my fumbling words for once:
OLD MAN EXTRA IN THE PLAY: We understand your idea, but…we spoke with some of the civilians…some of us aren’t pleased. You brought in Gypsies?
MARIANA: So?
OLD MAN: You mixed us with dirt. I mean - the Jews with the crows.
MARIANA: They were part of the Holocaust. Victims of the Antonescian policy. I can’t leave them out. And they’re only here symbolically, playing Jews.
OLD MAN: Yes, but…
MARIANA (interrupting): Didn’t whites play blacks in Birth of a Nation?
OLD MAN: Well…I’m not too good with history. I’m from a small village. And you don’t know a thing about the Romanian peasant. We won’t mingle with Gypsies!
MARIANA: That’s stupid. It’s racism. You do know you are being racist, right?
OLD MAN: We have nothing against them. My best friend was a Gypsy. But I’d prefer it if they were separated.
Shocking stuff on paper. How does this look on screen?
Framing this conversation at a remove, as Mariana eats her lunch on the steps of a disused attack helicopter, gives this scene a pleasingly distanced effect without being ‘alienation’ per se. It is a fairly standard ironising device that has been used numerous times since Dr. Strangelove. But, on my third or fourth watch, I couldn’t help but wonder if the Jude is not worried about the certainty with which Mariana approaches the work as a parable for any form of artistic didacticism. Maybe there is a schism between Mariana and the regular folk of Romania and it is, in some measure, irresolvable. By stepping back and not identifying closely we see this detachment. Possibly.
Barbarians contains numerous mordant ironies: liberal colleagues larking about and giving Hitler salutes, studying footage of old villains to decide whether some people just look more evil than others (Hitler had “fanaticism in his eyes” while Antonescu did not, thus inconclusive), and mise-en-scenes that feature extras dressed as Communists nodding in agreement with pro-Antonescu arguments and vice-versa. What gives these ironies greater weight is their presence in an otherwise ordinary world; this is not the stylised war room of Strangelove, a stage on which our fantasies of power can appear without consequence as the world ends. This is Bucharest, with traffic moving by, on a hot summer’s day where everyone is clearly boiling and annoyed. People will have the ideological arguments and fume about them for hours afterward.
The film isn’t a total comic joyride. Several scenes, such as the one which opens the film and an early Skype conversation with a boyfriend (who represents the film’s only real weak link), lock the viewer into a slightly unfamiliar space in terms of the cinema: we watch minutes of footage that Mariana is watching, we watch her read aloud for three minutes from a book, and we sit at an editing console as she decides whether it is okay to use footage from a different mass grave because there was no footage of the mass grave corresponding to the massacre commemorated (she decides it is not). It is possible you might be tempted to call this alienation because of the way the narrative is halted in favour of a foregrounded act of thinking.
But, to me at least, these scenes feel like a particularly intensive and necessary form of engagement that underlines how the probity with which Mariana argues with various naysayers throughout the film has been arrived at. You could compare it to scientists arguing with Flat Earthers if you like, but what we’re dealing with are perceptions of the subjective rather than the objective. Which only goes to underscore how agonising it is when you’ve read all these books and watched all of this archival footage of massacred bodies being covered in soil from the bucket of a digger, yet some old loudmouth can try and succeed in shutting you down on prejudice alone.
Among the best scenes in Barbarians are those featuring Alexandru Dabija as Movila, a city hall official who keeps turning up to ensure that public funds are not being spent on something that might upset the powerful. Movila makes a great foil for Mariana because he is basically the same as her: educated, lively, able to debate with alacrity and verve that which the Romanian extras can only fumble toward. Their scenes are a complicated dance; a sword fight; a seduction. When Mariana refuses to comply with his request to not show the incineration of the Jews, he pulls the play. She offers a compromise and he accepts, and then doesn’t go through with her compromise. In the end, he doesn’t care because he was just doing his job. He actually liked her work. A rare devil’s advocate committed to the bit. The film ends with him asking for her phone number.
The final thirty minutes presents the theatre piece that Mariana has worked toward in all of its comi-tragic glory. Bucharest’s Deputy Mayor swings by to anoint proceedings, with a speech cobbled together from inspirational Instagram quotes, before horror is unleashed. It would be wrong and not particularly informational to outline all that occurs, save to say that the crowd do not see the stylisation for its distancing intent. Against Mariana’s desires, the Soviets are roundly booed, the Nazis are cheered, and, in one unforgettable sequence, an actor playing a Jewish prisoner ‘escapes’ and runs toward the audience, who throw him back to his ‘death’ as the crowd takes photos of the burning hut.
On British television, from the 1960s until the 1980s, there was a character called Alf Garnett. Played by lifelong committed socialist Warren Mitchell, Garnett was to be a pastiche of the contemporary white working-class bigot. Contrary to hopes, his catchphrases and the comedy of the sitcoms he appeared in, warmed the audience toward him. He came beloved. At the conclusion of her theatrical piece, Mariana wears an unmistakable expression: I may have just Alf Garnetted the Romanian Holocaust.
The most difficult thing to write about when it comes to Barbarians is that it is quite sexy. I realise there’s a whole world of sexual politics screaming at me not to write any more than this, and I invite their criticisms: this is not the ‘ordinary’ sexiness of healthy good-looking people existing in the camera’s milk-eyed gaze, the narrative occasionally halting to imbibe them - but the sexiness of someone in their element surmounting obstacles in order to do something present and important but not especially ‘necessary’. I hope that phrasing rescued this paragraph. Probably not.
Lastly, I wonder to what extent Mariana is a Jude cipher. From what I can glean, Jude is as much of agit-prop theatre as he is of the cinema. Through my life I have had a constant wellspring of friends offering amusing complaints from their time spent working in the public arts. It is entirely possible to write a history of Britain through objection and obstacles and oppositions to public works, though I had assumed the European continent was a bit more laissez-faire on their money being spent on something weird and critical and capital-intensive and temporary. The language and examination in Barbarians seems too in-line with stories that I have heard elsewhere. Even the minor observations seem particularly keen.
Anyway. I’d probably put Barbarians in my top 5 films of the last decade with the gigantic caveat that I’ve not seen as much as I’d like to. It’s bold and funny and deals with life and deals with dealing with life and deals with art that deals with dealing with life. It is public art, the thinking of, the making of, and a film in one. Bathos successfully achieved!
That said I did have a chat with someone who is an expert in GBC (to the extent of publishing a recent book on said with a still from Barbarians on the cover). She said “yes it is very Godard.”
There is also a parallel cinema of ‘Romania’ or the Balkans that is concerned with itinerant experiences. I’ve only seen Gadjo Dilo (1997, dir: Tony Gatlif) and some works by Serbian director Emir Kusturica so I don’t want to claim any real trend here. Interesting stuff though!
Co-produced by the Dardennes, for another mention of them here.