Tales From The Golden Age

Conceived and scripted by Cristian Mungiu, the director of the Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, Tales From The Golden Age is a witty, goodlooking and spryly inventive portmanteau film that assembles five short features set in the last decade of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. All of them are constructed as Legends – ‘Of The Greedy Policeman’, ‘Of The Party Photographer’ – the better to illustrate how repressive states breed rumour, gossip and myths of an intensity that makes websites such as Gawker or Popbitch seem prudish by comparison.

The directors – Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Höfer, Razvan Marculescu, Constantin Popescu and Mungiu – steer away from monochrome social realism to home in on the absurdity and surrealism of everyday life in the Eighties. Officials paint dirty birds white and hang fruit from trees to impress politicians passing by in motorcades. A bourgeois family, anxious that the meat it eats is fresh, ends up having a live pig delivered to their home, needing to gas it quietly in the kitchen so that their neighbours don’t get jealous.

Fans of Good Bye, Lenin! and its angular approach to exploring Marxism and popular memory; anyone impelled by the 20th anniversary of the toppling of the Berlin Wall to dig deeper into Europe’s recent past; anyone in search of a genuinely original and very funny film: Tales From The Golden Age is just the ticket.

                                    – Sukhdev Sandhu, The Daily Telegraph