Liceenii1, i.e. "The Graduates", per IMDB, is, funnily enough, a crossover between a Romanian communist agitprop drama and a very early attempt at a liberal agitprop piece of Western influence. Let us dissect these two aspects.
As far as the first part goes, Liceenii is communist realism done by the book. Some dorky little boy (Bănică) from the province comes to Bucharest to study -- we intuit this by the fact that he lives in a state-provided dorm space and his father visits periodically to bring him clean clothes. That is exactly how things went back then, by the way, unless your parents were so far away that they couldn't visit, so they'd literally send you clothes and food by train. I've met enough people in my generation who'd live this life, and at least one in the previous generation whose parents didn't even send her anything via the train, so she had to make do by herself. By all realist accounts, communist society was much less "equal" than the naïve "sovereigntist" would believe, and so the authors decided to draw a hero2 out of this observation.
Thus our budding young boy becomes part of a sort of a gang -- errybody was "tovarăși" back then, mmkay? -- and he falls in love with a girl (Sârbu), only he's playing the coy boy, so he resorts to merely leaving her flowers at her desk at the school -- yes, everyone had their appointed desk in the classroom. And all in all, everything was much more orderly back then and teachers were, gasp, actually respected by their students. In fact I'm pretty sure that the teachers (Buciuceanu-Botez and Caramitru) were in fact inspired by a real Socrate and Isoscel. And in case you're wondering, yes, kids back then were smart enough to nickname their teachers thusly, because there was no "liberal" culture on the TV and no social media to poison their minds with shit. And since we're doing education: yes indeed, school was fucking hard, and in particular the mathematics were gruesome3. Some people, such as Ionică (Constantin), were not made for this, but oh boy, those who were really did deliver; and in physics, chemistry and basically in all natural sciences, which also influenced to a lesser degree engineering -- sure, Romanians stole Z80 chips from the West, but I daresay that computers back then were much reliable and cheaper than today's shiststacks. And you know, you had to actually know mathematics in order to "do AI", so as a result, the "AI" back in those days actually worked at rigorously solving precisely specified problems. What remains of all that today? Let's make this a story for another time.
Anyways, besides this, all the communist tropes are there for our amusement: all kids are good, even the misguided "bad communist" kid who loses his girl over his degenerate individualist thinking, as if that ever were a thing; meanwhile our hero is so dedicated to uplifting and shaping Ceaușescu's national-socialism that he breaks into the local school workshop at night to redo a tech piece he'd mislathed earlier that day; the local communist student chapter really debates democratically, and their judgment matters; and so on and so forth, everything summing up to a naïvely idealized view of teenage Romanian society.
This brings us to the second part of our analysis. The Western agitprop, doublespoken as "rezistență prin cultură", is much more subtle, but it pervades the film and it is mainly centered around the anti-character, Șerban (Petruț). His parents are doctors, so they're clearly unequal to everyone else; and besides, his dorm room is ornated with Western symbols such as Tweety, Tigger and I shit you not, the Playboy logo. Besides, in his individualism, he's clearly the coolest kid in the classroom, as he seems to be the only one capable of inviting all of his colleagues to his birthday party where they serve only the good non-alcoholic stuff (yeah right). Of course, even he himself turns out to be a great communist kid in the end -- I'm not convinced that this is what the authors tried to convey, but unknowngly or otherwise, that is what it summed up to: that whether you're living in communism or liberal democracy, you gotta keep up with the programme and make way for the new man, irrespective of all the details which brought the two ideologies at odds with each other. After all... Ionică turns out to be a great communist kid and at the same time he looks great in drag, so I really don't see any problem there.
Anyanyways, I'd decided to watch this on the 1st of December and for what it's worth, it wasn't the worst movie that one could review. All else aside, and even while accounting for the woodentongue, I found it refreshing to observe that everyone speaks proper Romanian, and more importantly, that the script makes sense from start to end, which, granted, is a very low bar, but one that most of nowadays' Romanian cinematographic productions seem to fail to achieve, as if every two-bit writer suddenly was aspiring to a Ionesco or somesuch. Finally, in retrospect the imagery doesn't look bad, while the sound is as horrible as ever, even with all the modern techniques attempting to repair it.
Anyanyanyways, it's available on the tubes.
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1986, directed by one Nicolae Corjos, starring Ștefan Bănică-junior, Mihai Constantin, Oana Sârbu, Cesonia Postelnicu, Tudor Petruț, Tamara Buciuceanu-Botez and Ion Caramitru. ↩
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While I have no special interest to delve into the details of how this sort of framing is built, I'll note that its whole point is to make Mihai into much more than what he actually is, i.e. a dorky little high-school student. The authors are keen to draw us towards the fact that the boy not only does no longer have a mother, but moreover, his exceptional love for the exceptional girl supposedly gives him an exceptional viewpoint upon the world, one which the authors continuously ram down our proverbial throats in the form of imagined scenes between the hero and the object of his love. I don't doubt the realism of this thought -- I myself have experienced the wet teenage daydream of collaring my own Dana, and at the exact same age as Mihai nonetheless, and furthermore, the thought had elicited the same masturbatory reactions which the authors sorta-kinda forgot to include in the film. I guess if you go read some of the earlier stuff on my old blog, you'll get some of the same sauce which the authors used as inspiration for Liceenii.
That's all fine, but here's the thing: there's nothing special about this. I might have thought myself special due to the fact that I was writing a blog, unlike most of my classmates who would barely have the attention span required to read a short-form text, let alone write it. All the same, the authors frame Mihai as a special kid for his ability to get acquainted with chess in a rather short amount of time. But there's nothing exceptional about this and he's not a hero. He's just a device for seventeen year olds living in late eighties Romania to relate to. Which is what makes this film such a stupid agitprop piece in the first place.
Now apply the same to your favourite film, say, Avengers or whatever the fuck's fashionable nowadays in the cinema, and you'll get the very same type of masturbatory sauce as Liceenii. This is incidentally why I decided to spend these paragraphs on this particular aspect: to show you that you're watching the same type of agitprop forty years later, only for some reason you're mislabeling it as art. ↩
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The tail end of this phenomenon was what led me to study mathematics in depth. All the people who taught me the discipline were raised in communism; I studied the communist books and let me tell you, the university admission exams were quite mind-numbingly difficult, much harder than anything you see today. If you don't believe me, just count the Romanian Math Olympiad gold winners over the years, especially in those years. ↩