Metronom: For Those About To Rock, We Arrest You
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
The Orwellian shadow that hovered over life in Soviet bloc countries has inspired transcendent cinema, most notably Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, set in East Germany where every other person was a paid informant.
In Alexandru Belc’s Metronom, that same shadow falls over a group of exuberant Romanian teens in 1972, doing what teens did and do, with maybe a little more political energy than their North American counterparts.
Ana (Mara Bugarin) is reluctant to say goodbye to her boyfriend Sorin (Serban Lazarovici)
It’s a coming-of-age story in a society where decadent Western rock music is deemed a public enemy. Belc’s feature debut (which won a director’s prize at Cannes) is both the tale of a rebellious 17-year-old girl, and a society where even schoolkids could be betrayed to the authorities by their best friends.
As the movie opens, Ana (Mara Bugarin) is heartbroken by the news that her boyfriend Sorin (Serban Lazarovici) plans to leave with his mother for West Germany to escape the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime. In the pretzel logic of teen angst, she decides that having sex with Sorin might get him to realize his love for her and stay.
The place for this assignation is to be a party thrown by her worldly friend Roxana (Mara Vicol), a get-together to which Ana is not allowed by her parents to attend. She ignores them.
The parties turn out to be a regular event, in which the classmates bring vinyl (much of it sprightly Romanian folk-rock) and listen and dance to Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, etc. on Metronom, a Romanian-language program on Radio Free Europe – a station that had recently been declared illegal.
The party scene speaks volumes to the need of these young people to escape from the grey reality in which they’ve grown up. They drink, smoke, make out and have a sneering attitude towards the old men who run their lives. The jokester of the crew even gets off a good Ceaușescu joke, saying that the stamps with his face on them won’t stick to the envelopes because people keep spitting on the wrong side.
And then, emboldened by adolescent invulnerability, they make a huge mistake. They jointly, amid much laughter, write a fan letter to the host of Metronom, with requests and some trenchant words about life in Bucharest. They then give it to Sorin to pass to an ostensible “French journalist” who, in turn, is to deliver it to Radio Free Europe.
The sketchy-sounding plan naturally backfires, and soon, members of the Securitate, Ceaușescu’s secret police, arrive at the apartment and arrest everyone. It is a dark turn, in which the partygoers are interrogated in groups and individually by bulldog-faced men who encourage them to write “essays” – confessions – naming names and detailing everything that was done and said at the party.
The clumsy attempts by the Securitate to sound friendly makes them seem even more sinister, a charade that is broken at one point by sudden violence. The upshot: every attendee at the party is subject to six years in jail.
Most cave immediately. Ana does not. She writes almost nothing and is shuffled off for more “fatherly” coercion.
Shot in a boxy 35mm aspect ratio, Metronom has the look of a melancholy memory. The actors, including first-timer Bugaran, are entirely believable (despite, in a few cases, appearing more mature than a Bucharest secondary schooler).
But it’s the depiction of the collision between free-spirits and pointlessly reactionary authoritiarianism that makes Metronom memorable.
Metronom. Written and directed by Alexandru Belc. Starring Mara Bugaran, Serban Lazarovici and Mara Vicol. Opens Friday, February 24 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.