It’s 1972 in Bucharest. Ceaușescu had been in power for seven years, and the fabric of ordinary life had been soaked long enough that his repressive regime had begun to erode. However, against this background of gloomy gathering, bright and new first love blossoms. This is indeed a lush setting for a romance doomed to fail, but Alexandru Belk’s slow, elegant and richly imaginative appearance is much more than a Roman take on Romeo and Juliet. metronome keeps time for musicians; “Metronom” describes how even young people–those most rebellious and optimistic in any society–can be brought into line with the wretched and froggy strokes of tyranny.
With this story of one-to-one relationships underlined by systemic fear-mongering, it is clear that writer and director Belk – who previously worked with Christian Mungiu and Cornelio Poromboio, and received the Directing Prize at this year’s Un Certain Regard section in Cannes – is clearly influenced by the Roman New Wave, Sharing a preoccupation with the way corrupt and oppressive institutions can invade the personal sphere. But it’s, refreshingly, not beholden to the movement’s aesthetics. Filmed in Academy Ratio by Tudor Vladimir Panduru (also DP on Mungiu’s excellent Cannes contest title “RMN”), “Metronom” has an unusually vibrant and warm palette: accents of deep turquoise and shades of raspberry cleverly deceive the film’s darkest developments.
Meanwhile, the constant close-up attention lavished on the film’s introduction is an unusual choice in a story designed to offer more general social and historical observations. But from the first shot, while Anna (Mara Bugarin) waits for her boyfriend Sorin (Serpan Lazarovicy) in a rainy plaza surrounded by friezes celebrating the nation’s military history, Panduro’s camera pulls the expressive aura of sun glare into the lens, indicating a visual approach that is far from realistic Steel and standard bravery.
Anna and Soren share a tender kiss, but the next moment, Anna cries. Soren has just told her about his family’s plans to immigrate to Germany, and Anna doesn’t seem upset enough about their impending separation. She’s savage at school that day—newcomer Pugarin is brilliant at communicating the self-absorption of her teenage character—and anxiously announces that she won’t attend her friend Roxana (Mara Vikul)’s party that night for fear of seeing him. She changed her mind by fate, and, contrary to the express wishes of her mother and the gentle pleas of her father, crept up to Roxana, borrowed a dress and resolved to shut down Soren’s affections by any means necessary.
The parent-free evening is arranged around the broadcast of exiled Romanian DJ Cornel Chirac’s show, Metronom, on the illicit youth culture station Radio Free Europe. And while there has been some talk of some messages of support that Anna’s friends plan to smuggle out of the country into Chiriac’s hands, these are all background buzz for Anna’s single focus on her relationship problems. Then, as she was dancing with her conspicuously trapped fellow, she noticed Soren’s arrival, pulled him into a bedroom, and began their first sexual intercourse, before teasing her lover in a whisper of “I love you” and watching him flee the scene. (Playing this entire sequence on The Doors “Light My Fire” is either a testament to how fast things can happen when you’re that age, or just a reminder of how long the musical part of that song is.)
Anyway, it makes a wonderful midpoint, where Anna goes for a walk to rid her head of her recent humiliation and returns to a party – and a world – irrevocably changed. Music and her friends paused in quivering, cheerful queue while the secret police, who had received a tip-off about the letter plan, were circling among the smuggled albums and books in Roxana’s apartment. Children are taken to a police detention center and forced to write detailed statements about the party, name names and blame for this harmless and largely symbolic but nevertheless illegal act of low-level anti-government protest. Although Anna had nothing to do with rhetoric, and seemed to be among the most politically indifferent in her circle, she proved to be the most resistant to such compulsion.
The restraint of Belc’s filmmaking is impressive, especially in the second half of the more complex and difficult film, where the temptation has to be there to be bigger and more extreme, to dampen key points that instead go down like pieces of paper so fine that you don’t even notice it they bleed Actor Vlad Ivanov’s veil is a symbol of this underestimation: his police chief does not raise his hand or even really raise his voice. Instead, the well-known regular New Wave system displays a gentle, sensible, stern but fair image that can go off like a light the moment its victim tries his patience. This is not a drama of sharp, theatrical performances, but of quietly rising inner tension, in which it is as if the moral fate of an entire community hangs in the balance of Anna’s faltering resolve.
What begins as a story about the wonderful pain of first love thus ends with a broader and more cruel kind of heartbreak: that of entire citizens, betrayed by leaders bent on stealing their individual rights, becoming complicit in the theft. Understanding without justifying the tragic little ticks and conventions of compromise upon which a nationwide culture of suspicion, betrayal and mutual distrust can be built, “Metronom” is a clever and invested homage to this doomed Roman generation, robbed of the liberties of adulthood before they even obtained samples them, and it is their misfortune that they woke up to life as soon as the sun went down.
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