Raport despre starea natiunii

It's such a cliché to do movies about horrible, buried truths from the communist era that come out after the (apparent) fall of communism, shyly and in vague glimpses, but only for us viewers to find out that the truth is far beyond our reach, inaccessible since the fellas coming to power after the revolution are the very same people who had the power before the revolution, only now under the deceiving mask of democracy. So it is in their best interest to stop the furious Romanian national Zorro from piecing the puzzle of these horrid stories together and revealing the outcome to the public eye. The idea of the film is not so bad, but the fiery and slight avant-garde (oh, yes, the director lamentably flirted with such techniques) of its approach makes director Carmazan's efforts to reveal irreversible injustice in post-communist Romania look clumsy and ultimately insubstantial. Unfortunately for Mr. Carmazan, he is just another stereotypical, not particularly gifted director feeding masses with the same old, recycled and overly digested facts about post-revolutionary Romania. Thank God there's the new wave of talented Romanian film-makers, Cristi Puiu, Catalin Mitulescu, Cornel Porumboiu, etc, to ace his directorial pretense out. "Report on the state of nation" is no more than Reader's Digest Hamlet for high-school cheerleaders perfecting their reading. By the way, I don't think the journalist's name, Horia, is accidental, the director must have intended that Horia should remind us of Hamlet, so beware: the H letter is a METAPHOR in this film!!! And the director also intended that this cruel, awful and merciless reality he had portrayed in his flick should highly impress us, move us, strike us, give us something to think about that we never (or seldom) thought of before (excuse me?!?), and ultimately something to be depressed about, but the truth is that, at the end of it, I found myself not seeing the point in wasting time with it. And I am a highly sensitive person; it's just that I can think of much better and common-sensed Romanian movies that lack ostentation, which touched me deeply, just as I can think of much more talented and visionary Romanian directors than Mr. Carmazan. And thank God, there are plenty of them now! All in all, as a famous Romanian scholar put it, this flick is "a shape without substance".