Victim of Comfort Mode The action takes place in the 80s in Romania. The story shown, according to the director, is completely invented, that is, the viewer should not worry about the fate of a certain architect, whom the Ceausescu regime rotted in the dungeons of its prisons.
The arrest is the arrest of the architect, the intellectual, according to the director, the “average” person of that time. In general, we do not receive a historical document, but rather a study of the behavior of the “average” person under conditions of psychological and physical pressure, in order to extract from him a confession about participation in a certain “conspiracy”.
The pressure is exerted mainly not by a man in uniform, but by a prisoner put into a cell named Vali, who was promised to ease his punishment. Vali is well-versed in ideological terminology and seems to understand the line beyond which listening to Radio Free Europe and reading banned literature turns from a bad act into a criminal article. Since there is no direct evidence of a “conspiracy”, this line should be called a confession of guilt, and Vali presses and presses on the cellmate: beatings, interrogations, heart-to-heart conversations (what is your favorite book?), again beatings, again interrogations, again conversations.
Our average man admits to something, that he listened to Free Europe and that he distributed some literature. In general, soon he is ready to sign anything and without any pressure tells everything he knows - who transports contraband, who came from where, what valuable things are hidden in his houses. And at this stage, the question arises - is this film really about the Romania of the 80s? Or is it the psychology of the average man who, for the sake of comfort, cannot even object to a man insulting his mother?
Why does Vali lose control at some point – because he was told about the dirt in his country, which he saw somewhat differently, or because he was never able to find in the average person any resistance, no dignity? The architects are arrested on the nudist beach, which becomes a symbol of openness and defenselessness of the individual. And such defenseless, according to the director, there were many then. And the film is about this reflection of defenselessness, which the director as a teenager realized then, in the 80s. The scene, when Vali loses control, looks in the context of the experience of weakness, the director's attempt to figure out - has something changed? In the image of Vali, perhaps already an adult director, beats himself and asks: why? Why did the regime leave and I didn't stop being defenseless, didn't stop being slime? In this light, the film seems a very bold attempt to move away from the traditional clichés of “executioner and victim of the regime.”
Is it scary to live under a dictatorship? Is it not more frightening to live on a nudist beach, which cloaks comfort slavery with the illusion of freedom?
6 out of 10
Original