There may be a few "artificial" moments scattered throughout, but otherwise: the characters are precisely someone in your social circle in 2015 progre Romania, while the interactions between them reveal the underlying social structure in its finest details. For example: yes, Lari, the laughing jester, is also the smartest among them all, but at the same time the most naïve, one testament to this being just the way that he gets his ass kicked in the parking lot; and, oh boy, I simply loved Vasluianu's acting here, mainly for its authenticity -- ask me how I know that.

Back when I wrote the initial commentary, I'm pretty sure that I missed the... let's call it "core lesson" of Sieranevada. At the very end (when they *finally* get to eat), it very much looks like the author speaks through one of the characters (Gabi) about the whole 9/11 deal and how the Patriot Act was bullshit and so on. To my eye at least, we are told that this piece is but a reflection of the Western world and its decay: some old folks clinging to their old beliefs and subjecting their children to rituals whose meaning was meanwhile forgotten by everybody involved, trying to make do; meanwhile, one of the family members infiltrates an "architecture student" who's drunk as fuck but otherwise has no job of being there and two thirds of the family members go hysterical, while the remaining third just sit at the table and laugh at the whole situation. And the fact that all this happens during the commemoration of someone's death isn't coincidental either and maybe they're not entirely clear what they're discussing: 9/11 is the beginning of Western decay (the second one after the Romans, at least), while twenty years later there's just about nothing left there. The family won't even get to meet for a parastas, because reasons and shit.

So if Sandra thought communism was bad, well... a great deal was lost this time around as well.