Movie Review: Uppercase Print by Radu Jude

Once upon a time, it happened to make aquaintance with someone from Romania. A good mannered, intellectually curious but with a certain penchant for unrealistic human expectations. Someone who looked genuinely interested in my culture and intrigued by my cultural interests. At the time, in Romania people were reluctantly making efforts to open to the public the files of the communist ´intelligence´ services, among which the absurd Securitate. After a good time of getting to know each other, that curious acquaintance of mine confessed that, when she was 14 or something like that, in her school from the countryside she was living alone with her mother, some ´Secu´´ guy visited her several times until convinced her to sign a declaration of collaboration. She did not delve into what exactly a 14 yo or so, in that Gd forgotten countryside could report about. ´What do you think? Would you still want to be my friend?´ For reasons of spiritual health I refused to have anything to do with that person. Yes, indeed, she was a kid, in a vulnerable social context, but what can I have in common with such a person?

Despite a couple of unpleasant political and social early childhood memories, I love Romanian cinema. I really do. In the last post-communist decades, it produced inquisitive film directors, young, rebels, but old enough to remember the communist times and ready to talk about it in a very direct, nonconventional way. Although the cultural establishment may be reluctant to welcome them - some of them do have serious reasons to do so, as for sure they may recognize themselves in characters or situations portrayed in those movies - the international critics do love them, and not because they are ´anti-national´, as they are unfortunately portrayed by people with a common past with my acquaintance. The international audiences of Berlin Film Festival love the quality of their work and the visual dialogue they promote, as well as the topics people like Corneliu Porumboiu, or Cristian Mungiu or Alexandru Solomon are brave enough to delve into. The young Iranian cinema is considering some of them, especially Mungiu, as a source of inspiration and their movies are constantly awarded at international festivals. Back home, some may complain their lack of respect towards the ´national values´ - where those ´critics´ thinking about the endemic corruption and the drama of being sick in a local hospital without enough money to fill the pockets of the nurses for basic care? 

At a certain point, I am still curious why there are not so many movies about the years during the Ceausescu dictatorship. How people were coping with the ´transition´, with the corruption and the brain-drain is an intersting topic, but I would be happy to see a critical, ironical, tragical - you name it - take on the many decades during which the country was rules by two illiterates.

Hence, my rush to watch Upper Print (Tipografic Majuscul) by the prolific and courageous film director Radu Jude on MUBI. I had the chance to watch at Berlinale his movie Aferim! about the forgotten/obliterated history of Roma slaves in Romania and appreciated, both as a historian and a film lover the brave take on such a dramatic topic. The movie was awarded in 2015 the Silver Bear of the Berlinale and it was well deserved for both the approach of the topic and the aesthetical take. 

In Upper Print, the style, as well as the topic is different. He collaborated with another talented Romanian, the theatre director Gianina Carbunariu, known to the German public as well, who is promoting political theatre on topics from Romanian recent history. She was the first to approach the story of Mugur Calinescu, a Romanian teenager who in the 1980s, when the Ceausescu dictatorship was at its hysterical peak, dared to write ´subversive´ messages on the walls on an Eastern Romanian city, such as ´Freedom´, ´We want justice and freedom´, ´We have enough of waiting in line´ or encouraging people to organise in trade unions as in Poland. Radu Jude integrated the theatre part with fragments from the everyday TV shows, including discourses of Ceausescu - made my nauseatic - and militaristic snapshots of patriotic man and women carrying arms and uniforms enroled in the Patriotic Guards, ready to defend their country against the enemies - as it was anything left to take after the ´communists´ stole everything. Watching it is hard to imagine that those images were aimed at real people and were not actually part of a kitsch parody. Just think about the absurdity of news reports about the new big capacity fridges when the supermarkets were almost empty or about meat-based recipes when the main ingredient, meat - stolen by entrepreneurs from the state-owned factories - was usually sold on the black market but impossible to obtain normally.

One of the enemies Romanians were told to be aware of was the Munich-based Radio Free Europe. Mugur Calinescu listened to it and eventually got his inspiration for the slogans. The Securitate guys - describing themselves as ´people who are just following some orders´, and displaying a ´high fidelity´ towards their country - couldn´t tolerate this situation and started a massive investigation to catch the culprit(s). The proceedings as well as the surveillance were dilligently inscribed into the documents recorded in the file used as an inspiration both for the theatre and the movie. 30,000 samples of writing were collected, neighbours of the neighbours of the neighbours turned into night and day watchers of the socialist order and in the end the young man was caught. His home phone was put under surveillance, his friends asked to report about him. His parents, separated, are under pressure to re-educate him. His school teachers are outraged by his lack of national responsibility. Regularly, he is requested to visit the Securitate offices, although he gave up his revolutionary plans and doesn´t listen to Radio Free Europe anymore. His radio is broken anyway. 

Then, one day in 1985 he died. People talk about radiation - this was a frequent talk about during and after Ceausescu, but I personally would love to read more about the use of this method against political opponents - undercover Securitate agents are attending the funerals. It´s over. 

The alternation between cinematic fragments and the theatrical interventions (re)creates background while giving space to the special story of one of the many unnamed victims of a murderous regime perpetrated ad nauseam by small bureaucrats fully convinced that they are serving their country. After all, they took an oath to defend this country, said one of the actors, with an idiotic serenity on its face. No remords that they recruited very young people, almost children, they operate in ´intelligence´ after all. 

Uppercase Print is a heavy story told in a bit over two hours. The main source of inspiration were the secret police reports on the case, made public - although often by manipulating the files or hiding those perpetrators still used by the system for, obvious ´patriotic´ merits - after the fall of communism. But how else can we understand dictatorships in all over the world unless we are aware that what actually a state-organised crime does first and foremost is to destroy the simplicity of human trust. People whose lives were affected by the everyday rituals of a dictatorship remain suspicious for ever towards their fellow humans. Some of them cannot be trusted either. 

Rating: 4.5 stars