Romanian New Wave Film: A fost sau n-a fost? Released in the US as 12:08 East of Bucharest

Directed by Corneliu Porumboiu  ·  Romania, 2006  ·  89 min.  ·  Caméra d'Or, Cannes 2006

The original Romanian title is the better one. A fost sau n-a fost? — "Was it, or was it not?" — carries inside it the entire philosophical weight of what Corneliu Porumboiu is attempting: not a film about a revolution, but a film about the impossibility of recovering one. The English title, utilitarian and geographic, points to a location. The Romanian title points to a national trauma.

The premise is deceptively modest. On the sixteenth anniversary of the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu, a small provincial TV station assembles a panel of witnesses to establish whether their town, far east of Bucharest, had any genuine part in the events of December 22, 1989. The host is anxious and self-important. The two guests — a hard-drinking history teacher and a retired old man who also moonlights as a department store Santa Claus — are increasingly unable to agree on what they saw, where they stood, and at what hour they stood there. Phone calls from viewers complicate matters further. By the end, nothing has been established. The snow falls. The program concludes.

What makes this film remarkable is not its comedy — though critics have reached for that word reflexively — but its realism. I did not find the film funny. Porumboiu is not satirizing fools. He is observing a universal condition: the need to have been present at the hinge of history, to have mattered when mattering was possible. The witnesses are not liars so much as they are architects of memory, and memory, as Heraclitus understood long before any of them were born, is not the river. You cannot step into it twice. The moment of December 22nd, 1989, at 12:08 pm — the instant Ceaușescu's helicopter lifted from the roof — has moved on without them, and no television program can call it back.

Porumboiu's formal decision is, in its own way, a stroke of genius. The central section of the film consists of three men sitting in front of a single static camera, talking. No coverage, no b-roll, no cutaways, no cinematic scaffolding to support the argument. The weight of the narrative falls entirely on the actors, and they carry it without strain. This is avant-garde filmmaking — not in the sense of deliberate obscurity, but in the deeper sense: a filmmaker willing to trust that stillness and language are enough. In contemporary cinema, that kind of restraint is transgressive.

But the film's intelligence extends well beyond its central debate. Porumboiu embeds quieter observations throughout that accumulate into something close to a social portrait. Consider the history teacher's wife, who appears briefly and repeatedly in the film's first act: she brings him his suit, locates the encyclopedia he has misplaced, butters his bread at breakfast, and disappears. The camera does not linger on her with irony. It does not need to. Her quiet competence in the service of a man preparing to perform his revolutionary credibility on provincial television is presented as simply the way things are — the residue of a communist era that promised women equality while doubling their labor and erasing their names from the record of public life.

Her labor enables his performance of historical significance. Porumboiu shows this without editorializing, which is the most damning approach available to him.

Then there is the Chinese man — the proprietor of a small shop, present in the frame, watching. His function in the film is almost entirely symbolic and entirely precise. He is visibly outside the ethnic and cultural compact of this Romanian provincial town, someone who could not have been swept into the revolutionary fervor. He watches, and he listens. His presence exposes the parochialism underneath the town's desire to claim its place in national history — a desire that coexists, without apparent discomfort, with the casual racism toward him: someone who, by way of being Chinese, was considered beneath even the Gypsies in the town's informal hierarchy of contempt. Also, a legacy of communist education. Porumboiu does not moralize. He simply holds the frame.

The retired old man, Piscoci, is perhaps the most morally complex figure. He confesses to having stolen magnolias from the botanical garden — a gesture of almost tender beauty — immediately after offhandedly mentioning that he had been unkind to his wife. Porumboiu places these two facts side by side without comment, and without any indication that Piscoci himself perceives a contradiction. He also notes, with no particular concern, that the clock on the town square has always run a little behind. It is a detail that functions as a metaphor the film never announces: a provincial town structurally out of sync with history.

The city's lights, turning on and off in sequence as the film opens and closes, suggest something larger still — the indifferent rhythm of daily life, systems cycling through their blind routines. At the same time, history occurs or fails to occur somewhere nearby. And near the end, a woman calls the program. Her son died during the protests in Bucharest that led to the revolution. She does not argue about evidence. She mentions, almost in passing, that the snow is falling again. It is the film's most unguarded moment, and the one most resistant to interpretation. Some things belong to lived memory and not to criticism.

Porumboiu won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes for this, his debut feature, and the prize was deserved — not for promise, but for achievement. A fost sau n-a fost? It is a film that knows exactly what it is doing and does it without a wasted frame. It belongs to that rare category of work that becomes more, not less, serious the longer you sit with it. 12:08 East of Bucharest (A fost sau n-a fost?) · Dir. Corneliu Porumboiu · Romania, 2006 · 89 min.