Bogdan Mureșanu Interview: ‘The New Year That Never Came’ (Romania) – Les Arcs Film Festival 2024
Note to Reader: The following is a conversation with Indepedent Contributor Dana Night & Romanian filmmaker Bogdan Mureșanu. The interview revolves around Mureșanu’s latest film “The New Year The Never Came,” which tells six intertwining stories that occur in 1989 as Romania is on the brink of revolution. Mureșanu wrote and directed the “tragicomedy.” Knight talks to Mureșanu about his process, background, and important elements of the film itself.
Dana Knight: This is such a powerful film. The blend of documentary images and fiction at the end is shattering. Rewatching those images from the Romanian revolution that we initially saw in black and white, I was surprised to see to what extent the color red dominates the screen. This made me think of some imposing paintings about the French Revolution, for instance Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People.” This immediately places the Romanian revolution in the long historical chain of European revolutions…
Bogdan Mureșanu: I actually had that painting in mind, but for other reasons, not for the color. And yes, you noticed the red now because we didn’t have color TV back then.
DK: The musical score also added a lot of intensity to those final scenes.
BM: The bolero is a bit erotic. Mixing revolutions and the erotic might sound very off-key, but it’s not. If you look at Delacroix, or if you recall the “sans culottes,” death, procreation, and eros go hand in hand. The revolution is a climax… The atmosphere was very charged with tension and fear back then.
DK: In spite of the tragic aspects, this is a feel-good movie. Centering the final frame on the character of the father, whose wish miraculously comes true.
BM: It does, this was my intention. I wanted to end the movie when everybody is feeling good.
DK: The movie made me think of children’s dreams. According to Freud, these are based on wish-fulfilment.
BM: Maybe. Maybe it’s indeed a winter’s tale. It’s not my idea, it’s a famous Russian critic, Anton Dolin, who said that. He wrote a wonderful review saying this film is reinventing the canon of winter’s tales… A political film that has a feel-good vibe, because of this fulfilled wish, which is a bit childish. If you recall the “Divine Child” from psychoanalysis, sometimes our wishes come true.
DK: I’ve been wondering about the power the movie has and where it comes from. I think it comes from this ironic gap in knowledge — the knowledge the spectator has going in. We know the fate that awaits these characters, and the level of knowledge the characters themselves have. They are completely oblivious to the course of history and what is going on politically. They are caught in a bubble, talking about the unrest in Timișoara as if it’s another country. “This would never happen here [in Bucharest],” they say.
BM: They say that because they’ve lost faith and hope. The grip of the iron fist of the dictator was very hard on Bucharest. That’s why a lot of people died there during the revolution. But, of course, we can’t compare deaths. A lot of people died in Timișoara too.
DK: This ironic gap reminded me of movies such as Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant,” where the spectator knows what is going to happen from the start. Or Paul Greengrass’s “22 July,” about the Norway shootings. The difference is that in your film, something good is going to happen, something the characters can’t even imagine because it seems impossible: The passage from dictatorship to freedom in 24 hours.
BM: This gap is also a principle of comedy. I defined the film as a “tragicomedy.” The audience is warned from the start that the film has something comical about it. The comical comes from the absurdity of the situations, seen from our point of view, but also because we know it’s going to be a happy ending: No more of this bubble, time capsule, Iron Curtain, or black hole of communism.
DK: And this was the concept for the film from the very beginning?
BM: Yes, and there is a hint in the movie that I had this in mind. There is a scene where the theater director is giving instructions to the actors on stage. They are rehearsing “The Maids” by Jean Genet, and the director says, “You need to exaggerate a bit because this is a tragicomedy, girls.” This is exactly what I have done, I exaggerated a bit. That’s why you have this scene with the actress going to her neighbor to ask for a punch in the face.
DK: That is a great scene. About domestic violence, and the puzzling reaction of the wife who defends her violent husband. It says a lot about the capacity of endurance of Romanian people. Maybe that’s why our revolution was the last one to happen.
BM: Also ours was the harshest communist regime, because many Romanians collaborated with the dictator. But also in the DDR they collaborated, and the regime wasn’t so bloody and harsh. Maybe it’s because we were alone. In the DDR ,they had their brothers just across the wall; In Poland they had the Catholic Church helping the people. Even the Russians were no longer interested in Romania at that time. The regime was too harsh by any standards. The Soviets were the “liberals” back then, Gorbachev was a star. I remember this scene when he was in NYC with George Bush, and all the photographers and paparazzi were chasing Gorbachev. At that time the Soviets thought ours was no longer a valid political model. There was a famous conversation between Gorbachev and Ceaușescu when the former warned the latter that he should change something, because things can’t go on like that.
DK: The lack of vision of the Ceaușescu regime is quite shocking.
BM: I think he was stupid, but also sly. If you think of 1968, when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, he stood by the victims’ side, the good side, and all of a sudden he was a hero of the Eastern Bloc. In return he wanted non-interference in his own game, and then he became despotic. He is an illustration of the old saying that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
DK: This makes Ceaușescu a tragic figure.
BM: Yes, that’s why I didn’t put him in the center at the end. I tried to avoid the shots with him dead, that would have muddied the story a bit. Ceaușescu was a victim of his own madness. You can clearly see that in the archives I used in the film. He was on another planet. He didn’t get what was going on. When the revolution broke out, his wife thought it was an earthquake. They totally disregarded the possibility that there would be enough people to start a revolution. He even thought he would buy them out with 100 LEI, which was nothing, one dollar. He had no sense of the dignity of the people. He thought of people in terms of numbers. Otherwise he would have just been mad. I don’t erase this possibility. We just don’t know.
DK: But the film is not about Ceaușescu, it is about the lives of ordinary people, going about their ordinary lives in extraordinary times in Romania’s capital, Bucharest, in December 1989. I know you started from a short film you made previously. Have you integrated it completely in the feature film?
BM: Not completely. I kept large portions of it, but I cut it. I played with this short as if it was an archive. I manipulated it, re-edited, and regraded it. As you said, in the finale I mingled fiction and documentary, so for this short it was the same approach.
DK: The film is composed of six stories that are seamlessly integrated. The stories are very balanced. Maybe you didn’t give the same amount of screen time to all of them.
BM: It’s impossible. It’s not that democratic!
DK: The dialogue flows very naturally, but there are some memorable lines. Did you work a lot at the script level, or was it the work with the actors that led to this version?
BM: Yes, it seems effortlessly acted but at the same time scripted. In this technique, it needs to be fully scripted. You must feel the script. You must have these punchlines at the end to keep the attention of the audience. It’s the TV series technique, but instead of episodes you have scenes. The backbone of the film is a TV show, a NYE [New Year’s Eve] show that was never broadcast, hence the title. All the stories and characters are somehow connected with this TV show — the revolution as well. So yes, I thought a lot about the script, for a period of about two years, but I still couldn’t find a solution to put all these stories together. I was really desperate. You have six stories, they can’t all start on the same level, they have to evolve, but not in the same rhythm. It’s like music. They must end, but not at the same time. That would be a cacophony. I had to find the rhythm where a story should start, then have a progression and this grand finale, and then stop. I actually wrote it with the bolero in mind.
DK: So we could say the film has a musical structure.
BM: Exactly. In a bolero, there are some instruments that start early, there are some repetitions and all this progression, louder and louder and louder, until there’s an outburst and it all ends there. I also started from the end. I knew exactly where the characters are at the end and what they are doing in the last moments of the film. In one month the script was ready. Then we started casting. The process of making the film was very fast. A combination of well scripted punch lines and, I wouldn’t say improvisation, but the liberty of the actors to alter and appropriate the words. We cut and added lines, it was like building a house. With a film like this you must have a plan, because if you’re missing an essential scene it all falls down. The whole structure is like a game of cards.
DK: Which scenes are you most proud of, and which were the hardest to make?
BM: The scene of the revolution with only 150 extras was very hard to make. Until I figured something out: I asked them to run towards the camera and then return, like the wings of a butterfly. They were refreshing continuously.
DK: That was also due to budget considerations, I imagine.
BM: Yes and even like that, the film was very expensive. The scene with the actress and the neighbors at the table, nothing is really happening. In that scene there’s just three people around a table for a while, but suspense is building up. That was very hard to shoot because we didn’t have time to rehearse, and we had to improvise. We had the script, but how to shoot it? The first shot was very bad. Then, we figured it out on the spot. Working with smart actors is amazing. I told them, “No, this is not the regular scandal in a Romanian film, we should treat it like a Western scene with three gunmen.” The actors immediately knew what to do once we placed them in three different corners of the table. In that scene they are basically “shooting at each other,” if you come to think of it.
DK: That was one of my favorite scenes. Also the TV show rehearsal scenes with their absurdist humor.
BM: Yes, those were also hard to make because we had to recreate the TV environment from the ’80s. But in ’89 the cameras were pretty new. You can’t use old cameras and pretend the story is taking place in ’89. We had to 3D print the cameras and we managed to build a functional TV studio. We actually had these live transmissions from one room to the other. That helped us capture the intensity of the acting, because the actors in one room were reacting to what was going on in the other room.
DK: So much creativity went into this film, you had to solve so many practical problems.
BM: Yes, we had to deal with a lot of practicalities and overcome a lot of technical problems.
DK: The scene with the father and son, when the child gives away the fact that he wrote something he shouldn’t in his letter to Santa… It’s a very powerful performance from a child actor.
BM: He’s a wonder child. His name is Luca Toma. That was his first acting role ever, I found him at the casting. I chose him because he had this sadness about his face, which is not so common with kids nowadays. He turned out to be very professional. I’m very happy that he’s still acting. I’m doing an animation now and he’s providing the voice for one of the characters. I hope he’s going to make it big, he deserves it.
DK: I’m always amazed at child actors and how good they can be… The humor in the film is sometimes politically incorrect. In the same scene the father tells his son: “You’re beautiful like me and smart like your mum,” then we immediately find out the child did something not so smart…
BM: Yeah but this is the problem with our modern days, whenever we are in front of a joke. The film is full of jokes like this.
DK: Are the characters inspired by real life people, stories, or anecdotes you’ve heard?
BM: Yes, that’s why the film had so much success. I mingled real things, stories, and anecdotes I heard, as well as some interviews on the radio, with my fiction. The situations are real. For instance, there was a demolishing action going on in Bucharest at the time, you had a lot of situations like that. The characters have nothing extraordinary about them. It could happen to anyone. I invented certain things only to find out later that even those resembled some historical facts very closely. Let’s take the most absurd situation: The boy writes a letter to Santa wishing for Ceaușescu to die. A friend of mine, a researcher for the archives dealing with the Securitate files, found an actual case like that. A girl wishing for a passport, wrote a letter to Santa and the letter was intercepted and became a file. You think you’re original, but not really…
DK: The scene with the two boys trying to escape was the most violent scene, and painful to watch.
BM: Yes, because there’s a lot of violence at the end. But again, it’s the truth. There were many real stories like that. Many youngsters died trying to escape communist Romania and cross the border. They were shot or beaten to death. Until the very last day of communism, people tried to flee. For instance, the director Nae Caranfil fled in December 1989, only to return in January. This is his story. Cristina Țopescu (a well-known television journalist and media personality) is another example. She crossed the border exactly like the two boys in the film. She was caught, beaten and traumatised for life.
DK: Those were really hard scenes to watch, but you blended them so well with the comedy, lightheartedness, and humor in the other scenes. This mixing of tones is a real achievement.
BM: Thank you, but I don’t even know how I managed to do that, because the danger of failure lurks at every corner with this kind of film. You have to be very attentive with the ingredients. You can’t laugh for half an hour and cry for another half. You have to be on a rollercoaster of emotions. Nothing can be too absurd, and nothing can be too harsh, because that would imprint some bad emotions for a longer period, and you wouldn’t be able to laugh again at the comical.
DK: There’s no recipe for this, you have to use your instincts.
BM: Of course I studied films with this structure and technique, such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia,” Iñárritu’s “Amores Perros” or “Babel,” Ulrich Seidl’s “Dog Days,” and “Crash,” “Shortcuts” by Altman, “Les Uns et les Autres” by Claude Lelouche.
DK: The multi-strand narrative is one of the most difficult structures to pull off. At film school they actually advise you that this is one thing you should not attempt to do as your first film.
BM: That might be true, but since I never attended film school… (laughing) … No, I’m lying.
DK: What is your background?
BM: I studied Political Philosophy in English and have been writing all my life. For advertising, as a journalist, for short stories, and scripts. For me, having a well-scripted, complicated, complex structure made a lot of sense. I thought I was ready to do that because I’m skilled in structures. It’s not true that I never attended film school, because I actually attended a lot of workshops with great screenwriters in England. I was admitted to the National Film and Television School as a screenwriter. I never finished, though. I was advised to make films instead.
DK: Who are the famous screenwriting gurus you mentioned?
BM: One is Nicos Panayotopoulos from the Mediterranean Film Institute, another one is Giovanni Robbiano from Italy.
DK: What have you learnt from them?
BM: I learned a lot from them. They are actually writers, not directors, and they know some tricks, practical things. For instance, with this technique in which you approach the movie scene-by-scene and you’re trying to find the rhythm, you have to apply a rule that sounds very simple: Get in late and get out earlier.
DK: In order to maintain the intensity, to not dilute the scene?
BM: Exactly. And I applied it. With this structure some scenes are crucial, although they don’t mean a thing. They are not super charged narratively, but they are quintessential. So if you miss those scenes, you don’t have the sense of time and simultaneity of the story. I was also advised to keep my dark sense of humor, even if it sounds a bit out of place to tackle such a tragic subject in a lighter tone. But not too light — dark humor is the key word here. He advised me to keep it and be courageous. Another piece of advice was to have an equal amount of respect for the subject and disrespect for the style. So this is what I had in mind and I think I managed, without any false modesty.
DK: About the acting in the film, you managed to get some great performances…
BM: It’s not the regular acting you see in Romanian cinema. I had Miloš Forman’s “The Firemen’s Ball” in mind. The actors did an amazing job. There are 42 actors, but they aren’t all playing in the same key, there is a bit of variation. Because I had this musical structure in mind, I wanted some of the “instruments” to be louder, or more intense, or strident, gaudy, and colorful. It’s a long film, so this variation is necessary.
DK: Most of the characters are multidimensional and nuanced, but a few veer a bit towards caricature, such as the communist party people and the managers of the TV show…
BM: Yes, those are more sketchy, it’s true. That was an intuition I had.
DK: I bet they all loved playing these parts.
BM: Yes, they all loved showing their skills in these roles. They were all professional and up to the task.
DK: You mentioned the budget, you said it’s quite high. How much did the movie cost?
BM: €1.5 million.
DK: I would say that’s a small budget for a multi-strand film like this.
BM: Yes, in the West it would have probably cost 5 million. It cost less because I produced it myself.
DK: But Ada Solomon was involved, right?
BM: Yes, but she was more of a delegate producer with the festivals. I actually raised all the money for this movie. The Romanian Center gave 15% or 18%. The Serbians gave 3%. The rest was… Well, I had to sell my house and stuff like that.
DK: That is so brave, it shows creative confidence.
BM: Or madness!