– Romanian helmer Tudor Giurgiu’s latest feature is a breathless, single-take chronicle of an emotional disaster in the wake of a shocking revelation
Andreea Vasile and Emilian Oprea in 3 Days in September
Not many contemporary films manage to hold one’s attention from beginning to end, yet Tudor Giurgiu’s 3 Days in September, the opening film of the 25th edition of the Transilvania International Film Festival after having world-premiered at the IFFR, captivates us from the very first moment, drawing our gaze towards a cascade of seemingly insignificant events and sustaining an unrelenting sense of momentum until the final frame. The strength of the screenwriting stems from its adherence to the classical rule of the unity of place, translated into the minimalist style of the Romanian New Wave. In this case, a small, private microcosm manages to encompass a universally resonant human situation, while also offering a timely commentary on contemporary Romanian society.
The opening scene, with the carefree Bianca (Andreea Vasile) and Victor (Emilian Oprea) walking hand in hand along the pier like figures in a clichéd advertisement, making plans for their future ahead of their wedding the next day, is ironically so saccharine that it already signals the calm before the storm – and soon, our suspicion is borne out. In the very next sequence, as the camera plunges into the action through a single take and matches the rhythm of the heroine’s ever-accelerating pulse, a bombshell is dropped that will sweep away any hopes of impending middle-class tranquillity.
While Bianca prepares for the big day, surrounded by her friends, as the cliché would have it, a furious young woman in shorts storms into the hotel and hurls eight positive pregnancy tests in her face, claiming that the baby is Victor’s. The details that pour out about their relationship are so precise, so brutally exact, that nothing can prevent Bianca from shattering the petty-bourgeois order of the occasion and her entire life plan in one fell swoop. Furious and desperate because of the betrayal, but even more so because of the attempts by everyone around her to persuade her that nothing serious has happened, she hops on the resort’s tourist train, which takes her around a series of absurd places and people. Like a lost and frightened Alice in Wonderland with smeared make-up, our tragicomic heroine strolls through the maze of the amusement park that the resort itself seems to be, and through its illusory nature and artificial gloss, it gradually takes shape as a metaphor for the values underpinning the fragile foundations of Romania’s newly emerged affluent class, to which Bianca appears to belong and whose hollow virtues she has embraced as a “good girl”.
Andreea Vasile, for the main part, masters an impressive emotional range, stretching from hysteria to apathy, and operates in a deliberately exaggerated register that veers from melodramatic to downright artificial, while Emilian Oprea is satisfactorily convincing as the one-dimensional Victor, who functions more as an archetype of the arsehole boyfriend than as a fully fleshed-out character. The movie’s most graceful achievement lies in its refusal to brand itself with feminist labels or to explicitly indict toxic masculinity, instead quietly recalling simple truths about the dynamics between men and women, and about the cost of delayed maturity and the necessary abandonment of one’s dreams, all while moving with ease between comedy and tragedy, and back again.
3 Days in September was produced by Romania’s Point Film. Its international sales are handled by Transilvania Film.
