A Slight Unease About Capitalism: Radu Jude’s The Happiest Girl in the World and the New Romanian Cinema

longer than the films’ screening times). The narration tended to follow or observe (in a manner suggesting a somewhat personified camera – the camera as invisible witness) a single protagonist or a single group of characters as they were attempting to negotiate a crisis, to pull through an ordeal, or to meet some kind of deadline. There was little or no cross-cutting between actions occuring simultaneously at different locales, little to no narrative jumping around in space or time. The crisis faced by the protagonist or by the main group of

characters could be a matter of life and death. This tends to happen especially in the early films of the NRC. In The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, the man who meets with endless obstacles in being admitted to a Bucharest hospital for diagnosis and treatment, may be very seriously ill. In The Paper Will Be Blue, which is set during the violent 1989 events that overthrew Nicolae Ceaușescu's communist regime, a young soldier deserts his platoon to join the fighting in the Bucharest streets, and his commanding officer goes looking for him in the gunshot-filled night; if he doesn't find him before dawn, he'll have to report him missing and suffer the consequences. In 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which is set in 1987, two young women try to arrange an abortion -an illegal act in Ceaușescu's Romania.
Radu Jude's The Happiest Girl in the World, which came after such defining films of the NRC, doesn't concern itself which such life-and-death matters. (Neither do Corneliu Porumboiu's first two features, 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective). The ordeal that Jude's heroine is trying to endure is simply the shooting of a commercial for a soda drink over the course of a scorching summer day in Bucharest. It so happens that this high school girl from a provincial town has won a car from the soda company; appearing in the commercial is the price she has to pay for it. She must have woken up in the early hours of the night (if she went to sleep at all) to travel all the way to Bucharest with her parents, who won't let her use the car anyway, having decided to sell it and use the money to convert her grandmother's house in a boarding house for tourists. Apart from the disappointment, the disorientation, and the heat, she has to put up with being patronized and humiliated by the people working for the soft drinks company, those from the advertising agency, and the film crew, while also being drawn between takes in an intergenerational conflict with her parents, in which sulking and insolence are her only weapons against the emotional blackmail and threats they shower her with. It is not a life-and-death matter, but it is certainly another ordeal story, designed by Jude (just as much as The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days had been conceived by their directors) as an experience to be endured by the viewer in sympathy with the heroine.
Another feature shared by all these films is that, no matter how exceptional or unexceptionally quotidian their plots are, a high degree of attention is paid to mundane details. The first exchange we hear in The Happiest Girl in the World has to do with the heroine's car sickness; immediately afterwards, the family car having pulled at a gas station, mother and daughter talk about menstrual pain as they change into better clothes in a public toilet. Jude's investment in ordinariness, as writer-director, feels almost militant. In a Romanian film from 2009, this was immediately recognizable as a mark of the "new wave" that had been ushered in by Cristi Puiu's first two features (both co-written with Răzvan Rădulescu), Stuff and Dough (2001) and The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu. In this New Romanian Cinema, the prosaic ordinariness of day-to-day exertions, objects, and language is freed from the burden of oversignification it had been indissolubly associated with in the Romanian cinema of the 1990s; in other words, the commonplace and the humdrum are exempted from their old moral and almost metaphysical links to the vulgar, the ugly, and the debased, and rendered as the neutral, indifferent, and sometimes dull texture of life.
As acting in a commercial involves a lot of waiting around, interspered with the repetition of a few words and gestures, the heroine's distress has an element of tedium, and Jude's direction emphasises the heaviness of time. This also happens in the other films of the NRC -not least in those which, unlike The Happiest Girl in the World, show us characters caught in the midst of life-and-death situations. For purposes of 'dedramatization' and realistic effect, the Romanian filmmakers tend to include chunks of time in which nothing of great dramatic importance happens. This preference for 'real time' is generally synonymous with a preference for long takes -sometimes keeping close to the characters (as in Puiu's first two films), sometimes combined with long shots (as in Porumboiu's Police, Adjective), often hand-held. This shared aesthetic is also characterized by a reduction of expressive and spectacular resources: there is no use of expressive music, no effort to convey character subjectivity through visual or aural distortions, or even through point-of-view shots; there is no great multiplicity of camera angles, there are no elaborate crane shots, etc. (Sometimes, especially in the early phases of the New Romanian Cinema, this aesthetic has been called "minimalist," 2 , although the term hardly seems suitable for Cristi Puiu's images from The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, which, simulating documentary shots of busy, overcrowded Bucharest hospitals, are always teeming with human activity and rely on an intricate choreography of camera and actors).
But where exactly resided the novelty of the NRC? Did it bring anything new to international cinema (or to Romanian cinema, for that matter)? After all, some of the stylistic features outlined above -the use of long takes for a realistic effect, the emphasis on 'real' duration, the accomodation of the contingent and the undramatic, of inconsequential incidents, the militant investment in the unglamorously quotidian -had been around at least since Italian neorealism (and its influential theorization by André Bazin). The emergence, in the 1960s, of documentary film movements like "direct cinema" and cinéma vérité had inspired a new style of scripting, staging, acting, and shooting fiction, aiming at an effect of life caught unawares, as in the films of John Cassavetes (often cited as a model by NRC catalyst Cristi Puiu) or, later, the early films of Béla Tarr. In the 1990s -an age of ubiquituous video images, some of them documenting world-historical events like the fall of the Ceaușescu regime in Romania or the wars in ex-Yugoslaviaa new urge to compete with this degree of rawness, of grit, of apparent 'realness,' seemed to seize art cinema. The films of Dogme 95 made quite a stir at the time, as did Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's Rosetta, which won the Palme d'Or in 1999, a couple of years before Romania started producing its own somewhat similar-looking films. ( What other elements of novelty could the NRC be said to bring? Acording to the director of Mr. Lăzărescu, Cristi Puiu, his emphasis on medical procedures and processes -on the processing of an individual by state institutions -was indebted to Frederick Wiseman's documentaries about American institutions, but it could also be seen as something more specifically Romanian. The Paper Will Be Blue and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days -two films which, following in the footsteps of Mr. Lăzărescu, did a lot to establish a NRC formula -both excel at scenes of difficult, tense, somewhat absurdist negotiation between the protagonists and various representatives of the crumbling pre-1989 state (from officers in the army to hotel receptionists); just as they both display a Lăzărescu-like sensitivity to social and professional hierarchies and castes (the medical, the military etc.), and their adiacent tensions. Puiu's co-writer on Lăzărescu, Răzvan Rădulescu, also co-wrote The Paper Will Be Blue with Alexandru Baciu and director Radu Muntean, and he consulted on Cristian Mungiu's script for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Rădulescu would go on to co-write key films of the New Romanian Cinema -Muntean's 2010 Tuesday, After Christmas, Călin Peter Netzer's 2013 Child's Pose, and his own directorial debut from 2010, First of All, Felicia, co-directed with Melissa de Raaf; he would also co-write the 2009 Gruber's Journey, a partly conventional, partly interesting historical drama by the veteran director Radu Gabrea, and the first fiction film dealing with the Romanian participation in the Holocaust. Every one of these films exhibits at least some of the stylistic features and thematic interests outlined so far. 4 Anyway, even if the figure of the idiotic and/or authoritarian official was, of course, neither new, nor specifically Romanian, scenes with state functionaries of one sort or another, both before and after the fall of the communist regime, displaying rudeness, corruption, authoritarianism, absurdity, exhausted irascibility, etc., would become almost a signature motif of the New Romanian Cinema. And at the origin of all such scenes, of all Romanian cinematic spectacles of individuals being processed by shabby, creaky structures of authority and power, it is perfectly possible to place a legendary Romanian film from the Ceaușescu era: Lucian Pintilie's The Reenactment, shot in 1968 and then suppressed for a year before being granted a limited release in 1970. Puiu, Porumboiu and Radu Jude, among other directors associated with the post-2000 NRC, have cited this landmark film as an inspiration (a distinction they have extended to no more than a handful of other Romanian films from the state socialist era).
The Reenactment tells the tragic story of two young men who, having got into a drunken fight while celebrating their graduation from high school, are forced by the authorities (a prosecutor, a policeman, a teacher, and a film crew) to reenact the incident for the benefit of an educational film. With the two boys being forced to do something repetitive, faintly absurd, and more and more ordeal-like, in the course of a single day, when not having to simply wait around and kill time, The Reenactment can be said to anticipate the tribulations of Mr. Lăzărescu, those of the two young women in Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, and especially those of Radu Jude's heroine in The Happiest Girl in the World. For doesn't The Happiest Girl also concern a film crew and a nonprofessional actor forced to do take after take -to repeat the same actions and the same words again and again -until she (nearly) falls off her feet? The Happiest Girl in the World can very well be seen as the post-communist Romanian world's Reenactment. But more about this later. Italian neorealism is also an obvious reference point, and thus can be used to take a tentative measure of the New Romanian Cinema's novelty. As Lúcia Nagib has written in a 2017 essay, what is now labelled "World Cinema" started "in Europe, more precisely with Italian neorealism in the 1940s, which, on the basis of a documentary approach to the real, offered fertile ground for the development of art and auteur cinema. Turning its back on Hollywood fantasy and standing on the grave of the Nazi-fascist propaganda machine, this new realist cinema unveiled on screen the gritty reality of a poverty-stricken, devastated Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. As we know, the raw aesthetics and revelatory power of this foundational movement inspired a flurry of subsequent (social-)realist schools in the world, such as Indian independent cinema in the 1950s, Brazilian Cinema Novo in the 1960s, African postindependence cinemas in the 1970s, the New Iranian Cinema in the 1980s, Danish Dogme 95 in the 1990s and many other new waves and new cinemas, remaining influential up to today. Neorealism was moreover the touchstone of André Bazin's concept of cinematic realism, the world's most revolutionary and most enduring film theory ever written, albeit in the form of short magazine articles." 5 Echoes of Italian neorealism are discernible in some of the early films of the New Romanian Cinema -and especially in a couple of early Radu Jude films. In Jude's Sundance Awardwinning short The Tube with a Hat (2007), a small boy from a village (Marian Bratu) and his father (Gabriel Spahiu) -an iconically neorealist couple -undertake an arduous day-long journey to the nearest town and back, carrying a very old and heavy TV set which they hope to be able to fix. Two years later, the New Romanian Cinema would produce a Palme d'Orwinning short with a very similar subject: Marian Crișan's Megatron, in which a village boy and his mother once again undertake a seemingly long journey, so that the boy can get the chance to eat McDonald's on his birthday. Once again, the pathos of the journey is in the classic neorealist tradition.
What's absent from Romanian films (especially Jude's) is that luminous, seemingly natural dignity with which the Italian neorealist filmmakers used to endow their downtrodden heroes. André Bazin has long ago remarked upon "the nobility and extraordinary dignity that Visconti's mise en scène [in La Terra Trema] injected into this reality [of the lives of poor fishermen]. These fishermen were not dressed in rags, they were draped in them like tragic princes. Not because Visconti was trying to distort or simply interpret their existence, but because he was revealing its immanent dignity." 6 La Terra Trema may be an extreme case -the ragged-princes effect described by Bazin surely having to do with Luchino Visconti's appetite for grand theatricality -but this quality of luminous dignity is common to nearly all the characters of Italian neorealist cinema, ambiguously poised as that cinema was, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, between Communist humanism and Christian humanism. On the other hand, the brand of Romanian neorealism represented by The Tube with a Hat finds its emblem in actor Gabriel Spahiu's comically wretched look: there's little place for his character to reveal his immanent dignity as he stumbles through the mud, cursing his fate in the rain, with a plastic bag on his head and the TV set on his shoulder. Sensitivity to what it means to be underprivileged -in this case, to the fact that the underprivileged have to spend most of their energy on things that the more privileged take for granted -no longer translates into an uplifting aesthetic, celebrating 'the nobility of the poor' .
Some of the themes of Jude's Happiest Girl in the Worldthe theme of provincials in the big city, as well as that of a girl presented by her ambitious parents to a film crew and its camera (somewhat like the little girl in Visconti's 1951 Bellissima) -also have neorealist roots (as does Jude's predilection for casting non-professional actors in some of the major roles). 7 And, once again, the differences are suggesive. In Bellissima, the mother (played by Anna Magnani) isn't scheming to exploit her own child only for the sake of material gain; she's genuinely screen-struck, and her infatuation with the movies is presented satirically, but also lyrically. Whereas the parents in Jude's film -the father (Vasile Muraru) an engineer, the mother a teacher (Violeta Haret) -do not care about their daughter (Andreea Boșneag) being the star of a TV commercial any more than they care about her desire to actually be allowed to drive the car she has won. All they care about is selling the car the same day and investing the money in their boarding house business. The daughter's pleas for being granted at least some time with the car -if not to drive it (she doesn't have a license yet), at least to show it off -are met with the question: "How would that benefit you?" The people in this film -and, more generally, in the New Romanian Cinema -are more insensitive, thicker-skinned than the people in the classic Italian neorealist films; at the same time, they are touchier, more irritably reactive, more easily offended. They often look both battered and hungry, exuding a sort of sullen corruption. For the great majority of Romanians (including the socialist bourgeoisie to which the families of the future filmmakers more or less belonged), the 1980s were years of material discomfort and cynical disengagement from the triumphalism of official communist discourse, most of which consisted in the cult of Ceaușescu's personality by then. Cynical individualism increased. The fall of the Ceaușescu regime at the end of 1989 may have brought a moment of communal euphoria, but it was short-lived. Society very quickly became polarized. A small portion of it fostered a romantic anticommunism which turned to bitter disillusionment in regards to what was perceived as a continuity between pre-and post-1989 structures of power. And, in the second half of the decade, when the right came to power, replacing those it vilified as continuators of the Romanian Communist Party, it damaged large sections of society with its brutal economic measures, while also alienating some of its anti-communist supporters by failing to fulfill its promise of purging pre-1989 elites. It was a time of severe general impoverishment, of get-richquick schemes, of widespread ruthlessness and despair. This atmosphere may be relevant to the pungently unsentimental humanism of NRC films like The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu or The Happiest Girl in the World, as well as to the callousness of many of the characters in these films.

The novelty of the NRC within Romanian cinema
What if we regard the NRC strictly in the context of Romanian cinema? How was Romanian cinema renewed in the 2000s? The answer is that it wasn't just renewed; it was reborn. By the end of the first post-communist decade, Romanian cinema had literally died: if, in the last decade of state socialism, the local film industry was averaging 25 releases a year, the number of Romanian films released in cinemas over the course of the year 2000 was zero. How did that happen?
For the time being, let us ignore the fact that, during the last phase of the communist regime, the film industry had been far from healthy; we will come back to that. As it was reorganized immediately after communism's fall, this industry consisted in a handful of film studios, each run by a renowned film director and each spending its share of the money, which continued to be provided by the state, as it had in the state socialist era. Hopes that this post-communist film industry would soon draw massive private investments from solid local businesses proved unrealistic. Notwithstanding a few co-productions with France (difficult to set up at a time when Romania was not yet a member of the European Union), most film money kept coming from the Romanian state. In a few years, snowballing inflation shrank those funds. Again and again, the big-name film directors who had meanwhile become studio chairmen made bad choices regarding which films were getting made at their studios. Even before 1989, Romanian cinema had never enjoyed a really good reputation among film consumers at home 8 , and its reputation only worsened in the 1990s: it became synonymous with technical backwardness, repellent shock tactics, hysterical anti-communism, narrative ineptitudine, dated artsy touches, cheap sexual titillation, cheap jokes -general out-of-touchness. 9 The pauperization of large sections of the population, the proliferation of commercial TV stations providing cheaper options for entertainment, the shutting down of cinemas throughout the country and their transformation into bars and bingo hallsall of these contributed to the dramatic decline of filmgoing in Romania and to the death of the Romanian film industry, which happened by the year 2000.
Institutional changes at the end of the 1990s created the possibility of revival. The rather feudal system of studios run by directors-turned-moguls and financed by the state with no questions asked was replaced by a system of open competition in which film production firms submit screenplays, with directors contracted to shoot them. This system, which is still the one in place today, is hardly free from criticism: from the very beginning it was suspected of being rigged for the benefit of assorted 'old hands' of the Romanian film industry, in a way that left newcomers with scant access to the meager financial resources. The 2004 competition became especially notorious, for this is when Cristi Puiu's project The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu was deemed unworthy to be financed; that film -whose international critical success from 2005 and vigorous emulation by other filmmakers would start the NRC phenomenon -wouldn't have been made in 2004 without the personal intervention of the Minister of Culture in answer to the director's petition. 10 Still, Lăzărescu and other films got made. Some of them found major festival success and international distributors, thus generating more emulation in the small Romanian film world.  3 Weeks and 2 Days, which came out in 2007, was already a Romanian-Belgian co-production. Jude's Happiest Girl was a co-production between Romania and the Netherlands. And by the end of the decade, with Puiu's Aurora, a French-Swiss-German-Romanian co-production, we already find ourselves in a totally different era from that of Stuff and Dough and Lăzărescu. This financial internationalization was followed in the next decade by a cultural internationalization of the New Romanian Cinema, which eventually made the label itself inadequate and outdated.
It is unquestionable that, for more than 15 years, filmmakers like Puiu, Mungiu, Porumboiu, Muntean, Jude, Răzvan Rădulescu and others have been bringing unprecedented international prestige to Romanian cinema, which before them -before this "new wave" -had been, for many decades, one of the most obscure European cinemas internationally. It is no wonder that few pre-1945 films have survived, since "the early Romanian film industry was a crazy jumble of eccentrics, conmen, and would-be moguls. Government agencies produced a few patriotic spectacles, but most motion pictures seem to have been produced by one-shot companies under extremely primitive circumstances". 11 It was only after World War II, under Soviet supervision, that a nationalized film industry started to gain solidity. Progress was fairly swift, especially once de-Stalinization began, and for a while, in the 1960s, things looked promising. By the end of that decade, large-scale historical spectaculars were being mounted regularly at the Buftea film studios (the local Cinecittà, as it was affectionately known at the time). Some of these lavish productions were French, West-German, or Hollywoodian, but some of them were mainly Romanian productions heroicizing local history. At the same time, a Romanian cinema of personal expression, of directors capable of stamping their films with very particular sensibilities and stylistic signatures, was also struggling to be born. In 1965, Liviu Ciulei won an award for Best Direction in Cannes for The Forest of the Hanged, and Lucian Pintilie made his first film in 1966, followed by his second -the epochal Reenactment -two years later.
Eventually, the possibility of "radical aestheticism" (as Claudiu Turcuș has called it), of stylistic boldness in the Romanian cinema, was snuffed out by the authorities 12 : there was to be no Miklós Jancsó in this cinema. Artistic mediocrity set in, later aggravated by poverty.
Documentary cinema was allowed to develop almost exclusively as a marginal, short-length form, to be squeezed in a limited (usually ten minutes) time-slot before the feature ("the real film", as far as the audience was concerned) began. There was a studio dedicated to it (named after Communist writer Alexandru Sahia) 13 , but documentary-making was often regarded as apprenticeship for young filmmakers who were expected to graduate to the supposedly superior form of feature-length fiction; it was also sometimes regarded as punishment for filmmakers who had erred. 14 This amounted to a stunning indifference and lack of perceptiveness on the part of a regime which, having taken upon itself, as an act of political will, the historical mission of generating massive social transformation, now didn't seem to be all that concerned with the documentation of the old disappearing world, of the newborn world, or of the interesting, evanescent transition between the two. At the same time, official policy required that a significant number 15 of the total fiction films deal with contemporary topics and, moreover, reflect contemporary social life, with its hardships, its dilemmas, and its heroes, regardless of how boring this agenda might have been for the general public and no matter how unstimulating it was for writers and directors. In other words, 'social reality' was an object of interest chiefly when processed and packaged as educational fiction. 16 Reviewing what was a rare feature length documentary at that time, Black Buffalo Water/ Apa ca un bivol negru, a film about the catastrophic Romanian floods of 1970, critic George Littera stressed the singularity of its attempt to restore the "fundamental dignity as a witness" 17 to the film camera. Even if Cristi Puiu would dedicate himself to fiction and not documentaries, the reassertion of this fundamental dignity would be the starting point for him and the post-2000 NRC. A film like Jude's The Happiest Girl in the World has a strong documentary component: Jude is staging a fiction, but at the same time he is documenting an iconic Bucharest location, right in the middle of the city, during a hot summer day, with real passers-by going about their business in front of his camera, mixing with his fictional characters, staring at their fictional film shoot. Jude shares Puiu's respect for the real-world geography of his urban settings, refusing their transmutation into a generic topography, their "anonimisation in the name of universal recognizability." 18 There was another flurry of political non-conformity and artistic vitality in the early 1980s, with films by Mircea Daneliuc (Microphone Test, 1980; The Cruise, 1981), Alexandru Tatos (Sequences, 1982), and a few others, before the general state of Romanian film worsened. Apart from the deadening political regimentation, there was a pressure to save money (according to historian Aurelia Vasile, the authorities even contemplated the possibility of reverting to black-and-white for most films 19 ) and, at the same time, a pressure to produce more films, to raise the yearly number of releases, and thus sell more tickets. Production values declined. The technological backwardness afflicting many Romanian films became obvious: for example, the quality of the post-dubbed sound -the badly lip-synched dialogue, the sparsity and dullness of the ambient noises, the lack of any sound design worthy of this name -lagged behind 1980s festival cinema and Western commercial cinema alike. Even at the time of The Forest of the Hanged, not even the best Romanian films had found many buyers abroad. Later, with the suppression of stylistic and thematic boldness, corroborated with the technological stagnation and general impoverishment of the industry, Romanian films became piteously undesirable. And not only in the West, but also (according to Aurelia Vasile) in other socialist countries (Vasile quotes a Czechoslovak film magazine which, after a "Romanian Film Days" event organized in 1986, found that some of the films were "too naïve and schematic even for our humble standards" 20 ) and eventually in their own country, too. Even if it was common for a Romanian film to sell 1,000,000 tickets on the domestic market during the Ceaușescu era (Romania's population in 1989 was 23 million), the industry never became financially profitable: for example, investments between 1976 and 1978 amounted to 611 million lei, while profits only amounted to 414 million; in other words, the Romanian film industry lost almost 200 million lei -around 40 million dollars. 21 Truly profitable were the films imported from non-socialist countries -from the West, but also from India. When these imports stopped -and they stopped completely in the 1980s -filmgoing declined. That's when the degradation of Romanian film theatres started. It was not entirely a post-communist phenomenon. Many of them were already crumbling or shutting down by 1989. 22 All this only accelerated the deprofessionalization of Romanian filmmakers during the twilight years of state socialism while ironically also increasing the material and symbolic stakes of participating in international festivals and receiving distinctions in prestigious competitions. Furthermore, while the authoritarian professionalization of the Romanian filmmakers under the Soviet regime of the immediately postwar period had responded to a logic of immediate concerns and constraints -starting a whole new cultural industry from scratch, building the cinematic infrastructure from the ground up, creating an immediately efficient propaganda medium, becoming part of a common Soviet film culture -, the deprofessionalization of the '70s was shaped by about the same kind of delusionary convictions fuelling Romania's gradual political self-isolation and economic austerity. The party leadership piloting vitally important cultural sectors like the film industry seemed to believe, in the '70s and more seriously in the '80s, that, with a serious deal of will and effort, significantly more could be done with significantly less financial resources and a higher impact in terms of propaganda could be attained with ever less sophisticated artistic and narrative means.
It is this deprofessionalization that Cristi Puiu would start raging against after 2000 (even writing articles about it 23 ). And it is Puiu's own brand of cinema, as represented by Stuff and Dough and especially by The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, that would provide the Romanian film industry with an antidote.
Although it sold few tickets in Romanian cinemas (less than 30,000), Lăzărescu provided Puiu's colleagues with a model of international success and with a model of artistic discipline. Its self-imposed stylistic constraints (long takes instead of analytic editing, no point-of-view shots, use of delayed exposition, etc.) amounted to a formula which could be replicated. This led to a fetishization of stylistic rigor which was new to Romanian cinema, where the possibility of radical estheticism had been durably stifled in the early 1970s.  24 None of these set the Romanian box-office on fire, but, given the general state of post-90s cinema attendance in Romania, some of them performed respectably, especially Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (which sold almost 90,000 tickets) and Netzer's 2013 Golden Bear winner Child's Pose (which sold more than 110,000). Present-day Romania sorely lacks arthouse and repertory cinemas, although its decimated network of film theatres has been restored to a certain degree after 2000 (in the bigger urban centres exclusively) through the proliferation of multiplexes, which led to a rise in cinemagoing figures after a long period of post-communist stagnation. However, few of the films released in Romania nowadays sell more than 300,000-350,000 tickets, and those that do are in most cases Hollywood productions. Still, despite the failure of the New Romanian Cinema to draw huge domestic audiences, it is unquestionable that its international prestige and sales have revived the Romanian film industry, which is once again releasing around 20 feature films each year. (These figures, of course, date from before the 2020 closing of the cinemas as a result of the Covid pandemic.)

Starting to move beyond the NRC
At the time of its release in 2009, Radu Jude's debut feature, The Happiest Girl in the World, felt in some ways like a typical NRC film. But, like Porumboiu's Police, Adjective, which also came out in 2009, it signalled a turn towards self-reflexivity. Porumboiu's twist on the observational aesthetics of the NRC was to make observation the subject of his film, inviting the audience to observe a protagonist who, as a policeman, is himself a professional observer. As for Jude, he chose to make a film about a film crew.
Like other NRC filmmakers (Muntean, Puiu), Jude had been supporting himself by making commercials. But, unlike the others, Jude didn't keep silent about this side of his activity -about the work for hire that was paying for his privilege of making art films, or, to put it more generally, about the less than dignified social conditions sometimes required for creating art (in the case of the NRC, personal work dissecting subtle ethical issues). Jude made this film in which he acknowledged an unease about it.
In The Happiest Girl, the NRC's interest in ethics (medical ethics in Lăzărescu, the ethics of police work in Police, Adjective) is turned on filmmaking itself. But this is filmmaking's underbelly (consisting, for these NRC directors, of their comissioned work shooting commercials), not its prestigious side. (After exploring his self-reflexive preoccupation with language, with its semantics and its nesting of power relations in 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective, Corneliu Porumboiu would follow Jude in delving, with his 2013 When Evening Falls on Bucharest, or Metabolism, into the subtle perversities of the relationship between a film director and his lead actress during the making of an art film.) In The Happiest Girl, the director shooting the commercial (played by Șerban Pavlu, who would become a Jude regular) is sometimes behaving as if the work he is doing there is beneath him -as if he's doing it purely as a favor to the advertising agency and the soft drinks firm, taking time away from more important things. But, of course, he is complicit with the agency and soft drinks firm in their consolidation of social stereotypes, in their contempt for viewers or consumers, in their callous, patronizing, humiliating treatment of this particular non-professional actress. The severity of Jude's implied critique of his own practice and his own milieu made Romanian critic Alex. Leo Șerban dub him "the most selfflagellating director in the world" 25 at the time.
Jude's willingness to probe and question capitalism, however timidly, was also somewhat new to the NRC. This "new wave" of Romanian filmmakers had preferred to train its inquisitive, coolly critical eye on the legacy of state socialism or on its brutal end. There had been but few exceptions to this rule (like Cigarettes and Coffee, Puiu's short film from 2004, depicting a confrontation between a pensioner who feels lost in the post-communist world and his businessman son). It is not very outlandish to see The Happiest Girl as a reworking of Pintilie's classic Reenactment for the capitalist world, as we already argued, as both films show non-professional actors submitted to an excruciating film shoot -for the sake of a communist educational film and a capitalist commercial, respectively. The Reenactment is about the production of morally edifying images and about the use of those images by the state for coercion into a certain model of good citizenship.
The Happiest Girl in the World is about the production of images of desirable things, which is another instrument of social control -a capitalist one. 26 The NRC, as defined by films like Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, Aurora and Sieranevada, Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and Beyond the Hills, Muntean's The Paper Will Be Blue and Tuesday, After Christmas, was a cinema characterized by rigorous observational aesthetics, strong 'presenttenseness' , and an avoidance of explicit political commitment. Mungiu insisted in interviews that, in making 4 Months and Beyond the Hills, he had tried to keep his position on topics like abortion or religion out of the films. 27 Puiu insisted on "witnessing" and "confession" as the supreme functions of art, opposing them to what he dismissively called "propaganda". 28 One Floor Below, Muntean's 2015 film about a man who decides not to share a possibly relevant piece of information concerning a neighbor's violent death with anybody, was sometimes interpreted as a film concerned with the postcommunist hypertrophy of individualism and concurrent loss of communitarian values, but Muntean declared himself indifferent to such interpretations and interested only in the protagonist's moral dilemma. 29 (Left-wing critiques of NRC films would start appearing after 2010, castigating the filmmakers for their lack of political awareness and for not being interested in social criticism targetting post-communist capitalism. 30 ) As we will detail in forthcoming articles, one of the ways in which Jude would help Romanian cinema move beyond the NRC would be by helping invent a more politically committed Romanian cinema.
Jude, who served as an assistant director on The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, started out as a filmmaker under the influence of Cristi Puiu, and his early films fit easily within the aesthetics of the NRC, as defined above. However, if the NRC aesthetics are rather 'purist' , Jude has given early signs of being willing to draw on other traditions as well -for example, the vaudevillian strain which runs through the pre-1989 popular cinema of Romania and to which Jude pays homage in The Happiest Girl in the World (where the girl's father is played by a beloved revue comedian), Everybody in Our Family (where three of the actors are also popular revue comedians), and especially in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021). Aferim! (2015) is a knowing, polemical contribution to the genre of the "historical" adventure film -one of the most popular genres in Romanian "communist" cinema; it is also filled with allusions to Romanian classic literature, both folk literature and canonical works. Scarred Hearts (2016) is a costume picture and a 'prestige' literary adaptation, albeit a highly unorthodox example of both genres. The Dead Nation (2017) testifies to Jude's interest in avant-garde cinema -particularly in films constructed from "found" audio-visual materials. As for I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), it is a complex attempt of rethinking the strategies of late-1960s "political-modernist" cinema (which had no manifestations at the time in Ceaușescu's Romania) within a 21 st century context.
As early as The Happiest Girl in the World, there is a flash of historical self-awareness in Jude's moral self-reflection as a director of video ads. In Visconti's Bellissima, the confrontation with the cruel and cynical face of the dream industry could still leave the fundamentally optimist humanism of that film's moral universe intact. The advertising industry in which Jude's protagonist, Delia Frățilă, dives for a day is a world in which dreams and fantasies are in themselves corrupt, cynical, and vulgar in their content, their aesthetics, and their profit-making rationale: there is nothing dreamy, romantic, or noble in letting yourself be transported by commercials, and everyone in Jude's film knows it only too well; Delia's reasons for engaging with the world of commercials are themselves pragmatic.
This lack of intrinsic appeal on the part of those epitomes of consumer culture which are the commercials, their easily acknowledged falsity, hint at a slight but significant deviation from the main road of the NRC's general views on Romanian post-communist history and society. NRC directors like Puiu, Muntean, and Porumboiu had incorporated everyday Romanian objects and sights into an aesthetics of ordinariness that was new at the time in Romanian cinema. They didn't use them as symbolic or dramatically significant props; they used them to connote everyday life. The off-screen experience of such sights was further normalized by their on-screen use. As the exacerbated signifying powers they had previously enjoyed on screen were deflated, these figments of ordinariness settled into a passive inertia and anonymity 31 . (Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is an exception. Set in the Ceaușescu-ruled 1980s, it is a historical film in which all the material objects crammed in the frame signify and oversignify; their allusions to authentic utility items and communist brands are meant to stir memories and emotions in the audience.) Commercials and commodities, too, became ordinary visual objects like any others, especially in the later phase of the NRC, inaugurated around 2010 (the year of Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas, which constitues a good example). This happened not only because ads had by then become ubiquitous, unavoidable in the urbanscapes of those big Romanian cities where most of the prominent NRC films were shot, but perhaps also because, by including them in their images, the NRC filmmakers were reacting against descriptions of their early films as "miserabilist" -as narrowly concerned with the precarity and squalor of late communist and post-communist life. "Miserabilism" had been a key term in descriptions of 1990s Romanian cinema -a cinema from which NRC filmmakers had been trying from the very beginning to distance themselves. Nevertheless, in the early days of The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the NRC had been associated by Romanian audiences with sordid subject matter as well. This perceived continuity with the "miserabilist" cinema of the '90s 32 was an impression that, by 2010, filmmakers like Puiu and Muntean were eager to rectify. By the end of the decade, the characters in at least some of the NRC films were living more comfortably middleclass lives. Thanks in part to the mid-2000s having been years of economic growth and increased integration into the global market for Romania, the urban landscapes through which those characters were passing in their cars had also changed, filling with brand names, billboards, and banners. Anyway, the presence of such objects (like the presence of radio ads broadcast between news and music hits in car scenes) was almost never something to be inspected or interrogated by the camera; it was simply accepted as contemporary urban scenery.
Almost paradoxically, the NRC drew on some unexamined assumptions from the 1990s about market economy, capitalism, and the transition towards them. In the first postcommunist decade, veteran directors like Mircea Daneliuc and Dan Pița had made films sarcastically exploring the dummy-like mimicry of Western institutional forms by the eclectic and primitive Romanian 'transition' society 33 . The underlying assumption in such '90s films was that the market economy and market liberalisation were the quasi-natural forms of existence of liberal democracy, and that it was only the remnants of some barbaric national or Balkanic cultural essence, ridiculoussness, or incompetence that could hijack an ex-communist society from this natural path towards democracy, capitalism, and civilisation. This was at the time an almost universal consensus among Romanian intellectual and political elites. This Romanian 'exceptionalism' was not something that was just passed on to the next generation -to the NRC filmmakers. In fact, the NRC filmmakers rejected its "hysterical" and apocalyptic staging in the cinema of the 1990s; the NRC was a reaction against the aesthetics of the 1990s just as much as it was a rebuke to the "lies" and "compromises" of "communist" cinema. 34 (Still, as we will explore in another article, the quintessentially '90s theme of 'Romanianness' would remain a constant preoccupation and a source of uneasiness in Radu Jude's work). However, the NRC left the teleological narrative of the necessary transition from communism to market capitalism untouched. Hence the left's suspicion that the NRC was a class-blind -and self-blinded -art form from its very inception, as suggested by some early symptomatic readings of this Romanian "new wave" 35 .
Whereas the characters in Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas are already well settled in the universal cosmopolitan cynicism of the world of commodities -brand names popping up in family conversations, displayed in supermarkets, or scattered in middle-class living spaces 36 -commercials, popular magazines, and brands are a no less 'natural' part of the streetlife seen in The Happiest Girl. The difference is that commercials are under examination here -advertisements as a device and reflection of market society, with its emptiness and brutality. Paradoxically, as its echoing of Pintilie's Reenactment seems to suggest, The Happiest Girl in the World intercepts an element of continuity between communism and post-communism. The continuity implied has nothing to do with the standard anti-communist reaction to post-1990 disappointments with capitalism -an answer insisting that capitalism in itself is great and that any flaws in its Romanian rendition stem from its corrupting implementation by the old Communist political elites (not properly dislodged by the fall of Ceaușescu) 37 . The very logic of the structured exercise which is the shooting of the commercial, the unpleasant discipline of bodies and movements, their wearying repetitiveness, and the inexorable functionality of their final result -this logic, commanding over the fluctuant subjectivities of everyone involved, discloses a rhyme betewwn state coercion and compelling capitalist seduction. The Happiest Girl's examination of commercials departs both from the anxiety of 1990s cinema -the fear that Romanian exceptionalism might miss the entrance lane on the capitalist highway -and that blasé resignation with the market society emanating from later NRC films like Tuesday, After Christmas. Instead, Jude's debut feature depicts a segment of the processing of one individual by consumer society.

The family connection
The Happiest Girl in the World (co-written by its director with Augustina Stanciu) belongs to a succession of features and short films (to be explored in another article) in which Radu Jude consistently conducts another kind of self-reflection: a socio-psychological investigation of the subjectivities shaped by toxic family relations. The family -the 'Romanian family' -is one longstanding cultural obsession shared by many NRC productions: these films meticulously depict domestic spaces, family dinners, or family conversations taking place in personal cars; hence the popular perception that these films are mainly set in the crammed kitchens of those gray blocks of flats. 38 This obsession is also shared by popular TV programmes or vaudeville shows in which humor stems from the play with -and usually the confirmation of -the expectations of stereotyped gender roles. In the NRC, family scenes are frequent occasions for the strategies of 'dedramatization' customarily deployed in these films to give way to tension, noise, and even paroxystic insanity.
In The Happiest Girl in the World, the parents try to persuade their daughter -who has just won a car after participating in a promotional lottery and would soon be the proper age for driving it -to sell it and 'lend' them the money to invest it in a family business (and in her promised future welfare). She prefers to think of it in terms of use value, even if the monetary value of a used automobile might rapidly decrease. Delia's parents have something of the gender clichés from popular TV shows about them: the mother is a nuisance, bothersome, obsessed with small details; the father looks harassed, sloppy, authoritative; they both seem grumpy, discontent, and they lack respect for each other. But there is also a strong ethnographic interest in Jude's depiction of this morose provincial family, somewhat greedy, with their avid desire to make it, and the aspirational gap between the parents and the daughter. They do not understand her desire to move to the capital city to study and live after finishing high school. They make her feel as if she is dependent on them, but want to keep her dependent ("Who will pay for the driving school? Everything costs money!"). In their quasi-patriarchal sense of entitlement -the children's goods ultimately belong to their parents -one can detect a generational gap specific to the families in Jude's films, a moral and psychological fracture between parents and the children whose lives they emotionally manipulate and abuse. In a mixture of love and hate, pathologies are created and reproduced in the family environments, but the responsibilities are not equally shared: not only are the parents the masters of passive-agressive mind games; they are also resorting to emotional blackmail to get what they want. In order to make Delia change her mind and sell them the car, they go through a whole set of tactics, from cajoling to brutal verbal repudiation ("You are no longer our daughter, you shitty TV pseudo-star!"). The parental selfsacrifice is invoked by both mother and father to the point of grotesque caricature: even the three sodas bought by the girl to participate in the promotional lottery were supposedly paid with great effort by her heroically self-denying parents.
One of the subjects of Jude's psychodramas is the language in which family negotiations are conducted: speaking and language are corrupted, deceitful, childish, and abusive ways of testing the limits of authority or masking authority, of dealing with neurosis or faking parental wisdom. The performative virtues of the parents' language, its power, are in direct proportion with its flexibility, slipperiness, and conspicuous sentimentality. But speaking is a necessary superstructure for concealing and easing authority. In Jude's family scenes, the recurrent precepts and sayings parents rely on to give some weight to their words are empty ludicrous dictums, conveniently adaptable to the context of the exchange: they usually bring in the authority of secular wisdom and age-old tradition in order to advance some petty requirement. "You cannot do all you want in life," says the mother, invoking cosmic fatality in order to persuade her daughter to sell the car. In fact, the business is already settled: while the commercial is being shot, the father is arranging the sale of the car to someone else, and now he only needs Delia's signature to complete the deal, as if she had already agreed to it ("But haven't we talked it over already, my child?"). Everything is supposed to be for the girl's ultimate good, and also for her grandmother's, whose house they prepare to transform into a boarding house -and she will certainly agree, for who would like to die alone, "like a dog"?
The functionality of the regular family seems to depend on this kind of casual deception, on passive agressiveness and small farcical insanities. But the casual deceptions and farce will run amok in Jude's second feature film, Everybody in Our Family (2012), as the parents there lose control of language and everyone goes wild.
Notes neoliberal war against public expenditure and services, the meanings and directions of the criticism of state "bureaucracy" shifted as well: especially in the post-communist East -where for a long time there was no great fear of the consequences of neoliberal policies, although budget cuts and privatizations did play a major role in the destruction of public services -discontent with public institutions went from denouncing the efficient oppression of the bureaucratic iron cage to an ambiguous condemnation of the inefficiency, structural failure, perhaps even inutility of public services. For decades, the increasingly conspicuous shortcomings of the Romanian state bureaucracy were associated more with the unfortunate legacy of the Communist regime than with post-communist policies of coping with the "transition" towards market-based economy. Criticizing bureaucracy often implied calling for neoliberal reforms. In left-wing Romanian critiques of the NRC, the critical eye turned by this cinema on the post-communist state was taken as indication of complicity with neoliberalism.