Apocalyptic dinner Life in a constant neighborhood with death has become the theme, perhaps, of Christie Puyu’s best film “Sieranevada”, made in the manner, though entirely colloquial, but programmatically anti-Romerov cinema – arrogant moralism and reading notations in it is completely absent. The large family gathered at the wake becomes a symbol of not only Romanian, but also Western and Russian society. Many cinephiles from our compatriots have repeatedly noticed how the films of the “new Romanian wave” accurately noted seemingly purely Russian realities, which is why the paintings of Puyu, Mungiu and Porumboy are so loved in our country. These realities include relics of Soviet life and the Soviet (semi-Kham) manner of communication, the unburied dead of the past and the eternal disputes about it as the present, the perception of oneself as the periphery of the West, which still does not work.
In one of the best scenes of “Sieranevada” representatives of different generations literally froth at the mouth argue about communism – what is not a scene from modern Russian cinema? Puyu wrote the script, alone, and surprisingly quite in the spirit of Robert Altman, he was able to work out many characters, their views, behavior, characters, was able to perfectly brilliantly combine all this cacaphonic ragtag into a well-coordinated choir, again, as in all his films, singing a holiday around our world. Almost three-hour narrative, closed within a small apartment, conversations and monologues about everything in the world (from communism and Orthodoxy to the “conspiracy” around the events of September 11), even seemingly random everyday replicas give us during this time to learn about the heroes as much as no blockbuster would give.
Only twice the narrative goes beyond the narrow location (after all, the director wants the main characters in his film to be the doctor and his wife, the actor playing the doctor, by the way, is very similar to Yuri Bykov) and both times meaningful: the first time - for the exhibition, the second - for the tragic description of the relationship of sons to the deceased father, who is accompanied by the assembled relatives. Here, in this second digression, Puyu deliberately quotes Winterberg’s “The Triumph”, however, his task is not to show the inside out of the bourgeois family, as in the case of a Dane, but to make the viewer understand that the past in Romania is not dead, but still saddens, hurts, and is still not buried. This is another reason to love this film in Russia, where, probably, only Balabanov in “Gruz 200” spoke on the same topic.
Just as later and in "Malmkrog", in "Sieranevada" sound Christian and apocalyptic motifs: here the solemnity of the funeral service makes for a while to forget family members about their petty squabbles, and at the same time the viewer to feel how sometimes ridiculous and nasty human conversations, clarifying relationships, mutual hatred and malice in the face of the mystery of death. For this reason, Sieranevada is clearly divided into several parts: before the priest comes and after, before Tony comes and after (the latter’s arrival is a kind of parody). Thus, both expected and uninvited guests come to the house - the first bring order, at least partially straighten out the chaos in the house (as, for example, one of the sons is a military one), others aggravate this disorder.
As if by the example of one Romanian house and one family, I show us the pendulum of the development of the world – from chaos to order and from order to chaos, the priest’s monologue about the fact that the Second Coming of Christ can simply be overlooked, becomes the spiritual tuning fork of “Sieranevada”, describing a situation that, although it causes laughter in the finale of three characters, is in fact very tragic. What is the situation described by the director? It can be defined as the bustle of physical remembrance – as if Puyu wants to say: “Our past is not only not buried, we completely forgot about it in the bustle of clarifying relations, the world itself dies, moves to its end, and we die with it every day, but the spiritual relationship to death and the world, and our own and our past, we do not have a drop.”
It is spiritual to remember the past and thereby push it away from oneself, to understand that the present (that is, we ourselves) will also soon become the past, that the world is not eternal - the heroes of "Sieranevada" are not capable of all this, and finally starting to dinner, like the heroes of Buñuel's "Modest Charm of the bourgeoisie" not at the first attempt, they can only eat edible in the surrounding world and think about nothing. However, this devouring-consumption will very soon turn from "Modest Charm" into a suicidal "Big Food", and then it will not be laughable. No characters, no viewers. Puyu knows this, so he leaves the final devouring behind the scenes.