Categories: film
Date: 31 October 2009 21:01:45
On the arts review programme on Radio 4 this evening (which was on while we were eating) they reviewed the new film by Cristian Mungiu, Memories of a Golden Age. He's the director of "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 days", which was a remarkable film about a Romanian girl trying to get an illegal abortion during the Ceausescu era in Romania. This new film (a comedy) is set around the same time, and got rave reviews on the show, and I really want to see it (we learned it is on at the Glasgow Film Theatre this week, but we didn't have enough time to get to the cinema in time as it is up in town. Looks like the DVD will be going onto my wish list). But at the very start, the presenter introduced it as a film "set in 1980s Soviet Romania" and I nearly got indigestion huffing and puffing at that (HD had to tell me to shush!). Since when was Romania part of the Soviet Union? (and even though it was part of the eastern bloc, Ceausescu never did get on with the Soviet Union and was much closer to Chinese and North Korean communism - his bulldozing of Bucharest and grand boulevards etc is based on that architectural wonder Pyongyang).
I thought I'd stop needing to blow a gasket every time someone said Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia et al were part of the Soviet Union now I've stopped marking my department's level 1 essays (despite my best efforts it just all went in one ear and out of the other). Bah.