“ When the Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism”

Corneliu Porumboius most recent production: “ When the Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism

România Internațional, 02.11.2013, 18:41

Corneliu Porumboiu’s most recent film, very much like his previous production, Policeman, adjective”, created a divide between cinemagoers. On the one side are those who believe that the story, in its classical sense, is something a film simply cannot do without, while on the other side, there are those who favor a less narrative kind of cinema. Film critic Tudor Caranfil, right after the screening, thought Corneliu Porumboiu’s new feature film “When the Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism” was “a challenge”, “the most passionate experimental film in Romanian cinematography”. His younger colleague Andrei Gorzo thought the film was a hyper-subtle anti-romance.” The story goes as follows: work is well under way for a production authored by film director Paul (Bogdan Dumitrache) As he is about to shoot a naked scene, Paul talks to Alina ( Diana Avramut) the actress with whom he’s having an affair, with the producer of the film ( Mihaela Sarbu) with a fellow filmmaker ( Alexandru Papadopol) and with a physician who examines his endoscopy. The film is made of 17 scenes only, most of which are static.

Filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu has said in an interview that his intention was to speak about the birth of a film and the constraints that go with it. Here is Corneliu Porumboiu himself.

“I was keen on the relationship between characters and the story as such. The idea crossed my mind about three years ago, when a new cinematography law was passed, whereby submissions for the open competition for financing from the National Cinematography Center was a director’s cut. And that brought back memories of my student days, from the very moment I took up filmmaking, since in school I always lived with some sort of limitation. And then I recalled that back then I also had a director’s cut I made at home, all by myself, timing the frames. And it is from those recollections that this film started off. And it’s just as obvious that the film also includes an interrogation on the way I started making films.”

“I was brought up within the confines of the 35 millimeters film, of the dire need to plan each and every frame. It was because of such constraints that my inclination for repetitions and longer frames sort of developed”, Porumboiu also said, recalling his early years as a filmmaker.

” The screenplay had seven versions. I wrote it with nostalgia for celluloid film, I wanted it to work like some sort of inward mirror and I was less interested in what my characters did, since you could find that out for yourself along the way. “When Evening Falls on Bucharest” is also a state of mind, a time of day we don’t get to see in the movie, a kind of poetry working off-beat in its relationship with “ metabolism”. The title is somehow tied to the way in which I see this job”.

Playing the director’s part is Bogdan Dumitrache, who also played the lead role in “Child’s Pose”, a Romanian production that scooped the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale. Speaking now is Bogdan Dumitrache, about how the shooting came along in “ When Evening Falls on Bucharest.”

” It was a quest we undertook together. It was a time when I felt I was deeply involved in a project in which we were doing our search together, and whenever we found things that worked, we inserted them in our film. We had lots of converstions. It was a month of rehearsals when we talked it all over and there were no directions in the classical sense. We knew the script, but we kept rewriting it as we rehearsed the parts. We had enough time to take in and enrich the characters.”

Here is now film critic Magda Mihailescu speaking about “ When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism”

“The fascination of the film comes from the very way in which the magic dispels after filming on the set. There is, however, something that all these films about film making have in common. The filmmaker is a lonely man. The main character, the director, although he has an affair with an actress, is still a lonely man. And that’s how the character in Francois Truffaut’s La Nuit Americaine was like, and there’s also something similar about Alexandru Tatos’s Sequences. You can see that in the way he walks, in how he smokes, in his entire behavior”.

“When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism”, Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s third feature film (after “East of Bucharest” and ”Policeman, Adjective”) has already been short listed for the international film festival competitions in Locarno, Sarajevo, Toronto and New York. With “East of Bucharest” a production that won the Camera d’Or in 2006, Porumboiu earned his reputation as a director and screenplay writer with a good ear for dialogue and an interest in the vast ramifications of truth”, according to Variety magazine.