for this week’s TRIBUNE : Radu Jude’s ‘The Happiest Girl in the World’ [6/10]
The Happiest Girl in the World
Director: Radu Jude
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THESE days it’s rare for a director to make a feature without at learning the ropes via shorts. But the list of film-makers who’ve achieved awards and acclaim for their “miniatures” and then struggled with the transition to a larger canvas is a long one – about as long as the list of film-makers who achieve such acclaim and are then seldom heard of again. For example, the directors of the Palme d’Or winning shorts at Cannes from 2000-05 were: Raymond Red, David Greenspan, Peter Meszaros, Glendyn Ivin, Catalin Mitulescu and Igor Strembitsky.
Mitulescu’s 2004 triumph (for Trafic) is regarded as harbinger of the ‘Romanian New Wave’ which gained further traction at Cannes the following year with Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu and then in 2006 with Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, followed by 2007’s Palme d’Or for Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Three years on, the wave continues to roar: at the just-concluded Cannes, Puiu’s Aurora was much-discussed, while Mungiu supervised the recent portmanteau picture Tales from the Golden Age and Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective receives belated UK distribution in October.
All of which helps to explain why a relatively “small” affair like The Happiest Girl in the World is appearing on our screens. Director Radu Jude won dozens of awards – literally – for his 2006 short The Tube With a Hat, and since debuting at Berlin in February 2009 his first feature has also done pretty well with festival juries. But even a viewer who knows nothing of his background may guess that this is Jude’s first foray beyond a half-hour running-time. The dryly comic tale of a bickering provincial family who go to Bucharest for the recording of a TV advertisement, it peaks around the half-hour mark and runs out of gas some way before the end of its 90 minutes.
Then again, there’s no doubt that frustration and boredom are crucial elements in Jude’s screenplay, co-written with Augusta Stanciu. The commercial involves endless retakes, in which student Delia (Andreea Bosneag) has to quaff a vile-looking beverage while sitting in the car she’s won for coming up with a catchline for the drink. “I’m the happiest girl in the world,” she trills – over and over and over and over again, as various technical mishaps intrude and the ultra-perfectionist director (Serban Pavlu) demands just one more go.
In the background, Delia’s parents (Violeta Haret, Vasile Muraru) have problems of their own – mainly financial, which they can alleviate if they can persuade their daughter to sell her prize. But Delia is heading to university, and would like the independence wheels would provide. As the scorching summer afternoon in bustling, dusty, car-choked Bucharest shades into evening, tensions and tedium simultaneously mount.
There’s much to like about The Happiest Girl in the World, not least the engaging screen newcomer Bosneag’s performance as a girl caught – rather like Romania – between materialistic individual aspirations and duty to family and community. Jude and Stanciu make some trenchant – if slightly obvious – points about the brash new consumer-capitalism dominating eastern Europe, the duo indicting companies who exploit ordinary folk like Delia and her parents in order to flog the latest must-have item. The set-up is rock-solid, with detail and characterisation – particularly thorny internal family dynamics – sketched with an impressively acute eye. But we get the point pretty early on, and the result is that rather than being sucked into Delia’s claustrophobic dilemma we end up pondering where Jude might go from this moderately promising enterprise.
Neil Young
18th May, 2010
(written for the 27th May edition of Tribune magazine)
THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD : [6/10] : Cea mai fericită fată din lume : Romania 2009 : Radu JUDE : 103m (BBFC) : seen at CinemaxX cinema, Berlin, 6th February 2009 – Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival), press show. {16/28}
Original report.