Mediocre folks
Michel Heitzmann
© Andy Lupu - Trailer - The Young Dictator
Black and white film. Not even 16:9 to fit properly my TV. A film noir like they do not make them anymore.
I watch a man in a pale suit and a woman with a handbag climb a massive marble staircase.
That is a scene from The Young Dictator that won two prizes last week at the Cannes Film Awards. Not the Palme d’Or. The indie one, same town. Best European Film. Best Actress.
We know plenty about Ceausescu after he became someone. We know little of the years that formed him.
Andy Lupu dramatizes the story of young Ceausescu.
A shy and shallow teenager, not to say a moron, is sent to the capital by his drunk father so he can send money home. He meets Elena in a Bucharest sometime in the thirties. A stupid brawl puts him in prison during WW II. Romania is fascist. He is unfairly accused of being a communist agitator. He becomes a communist to survive six years among them.
He becomes good at it. Power is life, he realizes.
She is street smart and inexplicably falls for him.
The war ends.
L’union fait la force. They will show them. All of them.
They marry.
Power is life.
They climb.
They reach the top. He does not know how to run a country. Elena tells him how. Run it like a prison.
Christmas Day, 1989. They hold hands in front of the firing squad.
Saint-Exupéry saw a poor child asleep on a train and mourned the Mozart in him, murdered by misery before a single note. In Andy’s version, the child misery did not kill. He learned to kill instead, to stay alive.
Power is life.
I lived in Romania for five years, starting six after that Christmas Day. The wild east. A land of opportunists, where everything was possible. Hai că se poate. Come on, it can be done.
Almost everyone I met thought this was their time. Their opportunity. The energy was enormous and completely wild. No frame on any of it.
I was an opportunist too. A company man back then. Driven by my insecurities, I showed what I could do. What we could do, if we had a mission. We blew the competition apart by being smart, aggressive and true believers.
I have friends from those years. We remember them fondly.
Ceausescu preceded us all. A destitute moron who lived hai că se poate before it had a name, and ran a whole country on it.
I have known Andy almost thirty years. He wrote it, directed it, produced it. Decades ago, he wrote an autobiography-novel about a Romanian who crossed an ocean for the American dream and ruined it. Self-mocking, he returned to Bucharest to become… Andy.
He could have ridden the same wild energy. Yet, he observed and created for years, and then dared to unmake the dictator of his youth.
Observation in an age of reaction. Quieting the noise.
Silence is not empty. It is the beam that holds up the mind. Without moments of non-input, our thoughts collapse upon themselves.
When I am there, I can be curious and create. I frame. So can you.
And so can Andy. He sat with tyrants, machine gunned and buried, until woman and man were legible, and had a go at a part of their story no one knows well. He had a question. How the hell did two mediocre folks end up running a country for a generation?
The dictator ran a country like a prison.
How are your days running you?
Full disclosure: I am a co-producer of The Young Dictator.
You can watch it here.
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