'Sieranevada' Filled with Sound and Fury

It’s not an uncommon situation: a chaotic family meal in which relatives reluctantly gather together and pretend they absolutely adore each other. Everyone prepares the food, yet no one is cooperating with anyone else; somebody is late, and somebody is too early; somebody is complaining, and another continues discussing political issues with which only he or she is concerned. But what if such a meal is in memory of the family patriarch, during which dirty secrets of both the passed and the living are revealed? What if these disputes are also somehow related to the history of a country? Director Cristi Puiu’s “Sieranevada” tells such a story.

The family in focus comprises protagonist Lary (Mimi Branescu); his wife; his sister and sister-in-law; his brother; his aunt, uncle and cousins; and his mother. They all convene for lunch in memory of Lary’s late father, but instead of tying the family together, the meal develops into a suffocating burden to all involved. For Lary, maintaining a normal life is already a full-time job—on his way to the gathering, he quarrels with his wife over whether he bought the correct dress for his daughter’s school performance and whether they should go to the department store Carrefour before the meal or afterwards. When Lary gets to the feast, things get even worse. He has to worry about the cooking, the priest being late, incessant family drama, and his own weariness.

Sometimes the unbearable burden of these trivial matters is portrayed in a distinctly visual way: In one scene, Lary is supposed to keep the kitchen door closed, but people keep coming and going, and different people have different opinions about whether the door should be open or closed. In a single long take fixed on the door frame, the audience sees Lary confused and annoyed over the lack of a resolution. Many other shots of the film are long takes, with the camera revolving around a fixed position and probing into different rooms in which all kinds of family dramas are being stirred up. After the simple idea of a memorial evolves into the logistics of putting it together, organizing the event becomes the most banal and most torturous work that hardly seems connected to its original purpose anymore. The contrast between the ideal and the actual is best illustrated by a scene where the priest, immediately following a touching ceremony, hurries to the restroom.

The film does more than depict the ugliness and indignity of everyday life. It also connects it to all the chaos that has taken place in Romania, the home country of both the characters and Puiu himself, with the rise and fall of the Communist Party in the last thirty years. The characters make casual references to historical events at lunch table and sometimes argue about ideologies. Indeed, there is a strong sense that politics is just a scaled-up version of the family drama: Everybody fights endlessly with each other without achieving anything or knowing whether they intended to achieve anything in the first place. This inefficiency applies not only to Romanian politics but rather to politics in general—one of Lary’s cousins attempts throughout the course of the meal to share YouTube videos of 9/11 conspiracy theories with the rest of the family.

However, if both everyday life and political activism are so tiring and useless, what can we do about them? The characters don’t know, and, it seems, neither does the director himself. The biggest weakness of “Sieranevada” is its complete lack of resolution following three hours of largely unvarying quarrels and frustration. What is the point of the film if it is just a representation with no ideal or conclusion? Or maybe the film does provide a salve to all the problems in the world: “You’ll be surprised by how calm people get after their bellies are full, and how quickly you forget about 9/11 after you get laid.”

––Staff writer Tianxing V. Lan can be reached at tianxing.lan@thecrimson.com.