Europe Endless - Eastern Europe: Aurora (Dir Cristi Puiu , 3h4m, 2010)

We could go into great detail of the storied history of Romanian cinema, from very late 19th Century, through the First and Second World Wars, and of course, life under communism: together they depict the arrival of an unexpected powerhouse in Eastern European cinema. Let us instead consider the now. One is struck by a nation of film-goers - even the Soviets were keen to screen films such as Rome Open City and In the Heat of the Night - and one that, even under the control of the USSR, equipped its filmmakers and their crews in a system that rivalled any nation's film schools. 

Romanian cinema would only become more prominent in the late 2000s and early 2010s, as the Romanian New Wave emerged; at its head, two short films would set the stage for this new movement: Cristi Puiu's Cigarettes and Coffee, and Cătălin Mitulescu's Trafic (both 2004). Whilst Mitulescu would be eclipsed by others in the movement, most notably Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or–winning films 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) and Fjord (2026), Puiu remains one of the leading figures of the movement.

A man walks into a police station, and announces to the uninterested officers that he has killed four people. We, the audience, know he's not lying; matter-of-factly, we, via the cinematography of Viorel Sergovici, have seen him do it. Such is Aurora, Puiu's third film; before this, he has directed a number of shorts, including the aforementioned Cigarettes and Coffee, 2001's Stuff and Dough and his (and indeed, arguably Romanian New Wave's) breakthrough, the bleakly comic The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, in which a man is ferried from hospital to hospital in search of someone who will treat him. Mr. Lazarescu certainly, through its verité style of filming, its slow, naturalistic pace and its long takes, feels like the perfect introduction to Puiu's style: both, after all, are part of his "Six Stories from the Outskirts of Bucharest" series of films. 

A man walks into a police station. A man walks into a chemist. For several minutes he remonstrates with the two pharmacists for a prescription for Xanax. There are no cuts, there is little movement of the camera from Sergovici, we are simply there, in the room with these three characters; it is easy to compare Puiu to Tarkovsky, these pure verité moments of slow cinema where the film's characters interact, sans cuts, but this is not merely the "sculpting of time" of the Soviet director, who Puiu regards as both landmark in his film-watching as a younger man, but also "overinflated". Puiu does not sculpt his time, he observes it. Whilst this is taken to colossal scale, with the five hour Malmkrog (2020), in which three conversations, one shot entirely in one locked off framing take place before camera, even in Aurora, the camera often remains stationary, the action minimal. In Mr. Lazarescu, this adds a grim humour to proceedings, tracking the ailing protagonist from place to place.

In Aurora, it is the calm before the storm. The man who walks into the chemist, and subsequently leaves, several minutes later, is Viorel, a divorced metal worker, who we see at various points midway through redecorating a house, a project on which he seems to make little progress. For nearly the first third, there is a documentary feel, following Viorel (played by Puiu himself) in his day-to-day life, a role for which Puiu had to learn to drive. If it is a documentary, it is one where neither the subject matter or the focus of the film ever come into focus - we simply follow Puiu around, as he drives his for-sale car and work van. Through all of this, Viorel comes across as odd, furtive, often peering around the sides of vehicles, or sneaking across railway lines. At best, he comes across as awkward, but for much of the first third of the film, as he criss-crosses the outskirts of Bucharest and beyond, there is an underlying darkness to his actions. 

For what these great sections of mundane life, of Viorel's furtive secrecy, of his daily existence, his interactions with his neighbours - there is a subplot of the bathroom of the flat he's renovating being flooded by their child, which Viorel attempts to underplay - ultimately are a mask. Weaved through the film's vast opening third are actions out of step with this mundane existence. Here, Viorel buys a gun, and the illegal firing pins, the two actions given the same focus, the same detailed minutiae, the gun later hidden in the same house he then goes about renovating, an inherent threat of some impending violence that takes nearly another hour to occur. 

Yet, there is something particularly shocking about how Puiu deals with violence - it is sudden, disturbing, and yet dealt with in a frighteningly matter-of-fact way, the gunshots alerting us to what has happened, as Viorel flees the scene. It is easy, with its realism, its long running time and its sudden explosions of violence, to compare it to Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, but Akerman identifies why the violence occurs, whilst we, and the police ultimately investigating, remain in the dark as to Viorel's motives. Whether intended or not, Puiu creates a striking depiction of male violence in his native Romania, bubbling just below the surface of the every-day lives of its citizens. 

More than this, though, Aurora remains an impressively paced - three hours feel like half that - consideration of what constitutes a crime film, whilst also acting as the film's narrative centre, a man who we see much of in his everyday life, but learn little about. Aurora is a film about violence, about time, and about the darkness lurking behind the banal, and stakes out Romania's claim to being one of the great cinematic cultures of Europe.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Aurora is avaiable for streaming from YouTube via the CinePub Channel and on https://en.cinepub.ro, and available on DVD and BluRay from  ‎ New Wave Films

Next week and indeed, next month, we begin our final leg of our European adventures with another master of the longtake as we consider Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia