By Robert Koehler
AFI FEST Daily News

A primary mission behind the programming of this year’s Festival wasn’t simply to select a group of essential work from the international film world, but to offer some interesting choices from countries with rich and fascinating national cinemas. These national tendencies vary enormously, of course: From (for example) the long, hoary tradition of Germany, whose filmmaking extends back to the origins of the art form, to Romania, a country steeped in artistic traditions which has rarely, until now, achieved global acclaim for its cinema.

The German and Romanian cases are interesting, because neither country was producing much work of any real note a decade ago. The so-called “New German Cinema” of the 1970s, largely involving several of the Filmverlag der Autoren filmmakers and led by Fassbinder, Wenders, Schlondorff, Herzog, Syberberg, Von Trotta and Achternbusch (don’t forget Achternbusch!), proved to be a genuine movement that arrived just as the ’70s American “rebel cinema” was turning tame. It marked a generational shift, the assertion that German film was a part of Europe and the world. For Romania, long dominated by institutional backwardness, the grim years of Ceauşescu and the singular voices of such filmmakers as Lucien Pintillie, there was no such movement.

But waves come and go, and after a while, Germany was dominated by the likes of Tom Tykwer; in Romania, near silence. Then, suddenly, in this decade, The Berlin School and its brilliant circle of young filmmakers ranging from Ulrich Kohler to Maren Ade, and the unexpected burst of Romanian filmmaking genius, led by Cristi Puiu, whose STUFF AND DOUGH (2001) and THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (2005) marked one of those breakthroughs that cinephiles live for. In the larger German-language cinema, Austrian-based (though German-born) Michael Haneke startled the film festival world with such stabs to the soul as THE SEVENTH CONTINENT (1989), BENNY’S VIDEO (1992), FUNNY GAMES (1997) and, then, encompassing all of Europe in his sights, CODE INCONNU (2000) and TIME OF THE WOLF (2003).

Ade’s second feature, EVERYONE ELSE, is a quintessential example of the qualities of the Berlin School–a term that Ade herself tends to dismiss, while admitting that it’s stuck over the course of nine years and does, after all, identify a cinema with distinct traits. What are they? Look at EVERYONE ELSE: A direct camera, unconcerned with style for its own sake or the Tykwer Speed School, a yearning for honesty in front of and behind the camera, even perhaps a supreme trust that the viewer has the ability to see and listen to contemporary characters caught in (quite often) personal crises.

Ade has noted the impact of Cassavetes’ A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974)–especially the feeling of improvisation within which is an actually fully-written screenplay–and Bergman’s SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE (1973), as well as Antonioni’s LA NOTTE (1961), as films examining the ways in which couples are the creators of their own self-destruction. One might add another Antonioni masterpiece, L’AVVENTURA (1960), especially in how the action takes place on a Mediterranean island (Sardinia) and how the central male character is a disaffected, somewhat passive-aggressive and struggling architect (played here by acclaimed German stage actor, Lars Eidinger). Each film, too, ends with a gesture of forgiveness mixed with pity, as the hand of Eidinger’s would-be life mate, played with flinty bravura by Birgit Minichmayr, touches Eidinger’s face. The end, or a new beginning? Ade refuses to play her hand: Another Berlin School trait.

Haneke made THE WHITE RIBBON as an inquiry into what built the social values of cruelty that branded so much of Germany in the 20th century. He’s of course a filmmaker who himself has been defined as cruel, with the original FUNNY GAMES now (fairly?) seen as the godfather of torture porn. As part of the generation before Ade and the Berlin Schoolers, Haneke is attentive to a Europe capable of the worst horrors, and in THE WHITE RIBBON, the chain of horror is expressed in its most secretive form by a group of children in a northern German village on the eve of World War I. But as the multiple dramas in the film play out, the greater horror is quite possibly behind closed doors, where parents exact punishment and cruelties of their own, fostering a cycle of violence.

In AFI FEST, Romanian cinema’s renaissance is on full display. Puiu’s impact is fully felt, particularly in Razvan Radulescu’s and Melissa de Raaf’s FIRST OF ALL, FELICIA. Radulescu is Puiu’s co-writer, and he brings the same sense of absurd entrapment that defined THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU to the story of FIRST OF ALL, FELICIA, in which a grown daughter (Ozana Oancea’s Felicia) is all too ready to return to her adopted Dutch home after a brief holiday with her parents. Try as she might, everything conspires to keep Felicia unable to fly back home and grounded with mother (Ileana Cernat). Co-director De Raaf is Dutch (as is an ample amount of the film’s dialogue), but the film is fully Romanian. Which means, exactly, what? This is a possibly dangerous answer, since no national cinema can ever be accurately defined. But there are things that matter to the new generation of Romanian filmmakers, including Radulescu and Porimboiu: A subtle sense of nonsense; casting actors of immense strength and intelligence; cinema storytelling that’s concerned with behavior more than action; comedy underlying the deeply serious, rather than the other way around; a refusal to manipulate audiences; an ever more radical refusal to lecture; a love of the beauty of real time.

All of these are in Porimboiu’s extraordinary POLICE, ADJECTIVE, which concerns the day-to-day labors of an undercover cop tailing a drug-dealing suspect (who may not be dealing at all). To be more accurate, this is the film’s surface concern (the title is a joke on the definitional meaning of the adjectival use of the word “police,” as in a policier, a movie about policing). The real concern is the ways in which the use of words and language has enormous impact, and how these can define a state of liberty or control. Cop Cristi (Dragos Bucur) knows that his pursuit is pointless; Porimboiu usually shoots his surveillance activity from a distance, as if the filmmaker were spying on the spy, an artist’s revenge for decades’ worth of state police snooping on innocents. But when Cristi is at his office, or at home, it’s a different matter: He’s no longer “Police” (or even “Police” as an adjective), but a put-upon human being suffering fools and jerks, or exploring and debating the finer points of song lyrics with his wife, who’s a teacher and all too concerned with language.

As is Cristi’s boss (played in one of recent cinema’s truly great scenes by Romanian cinema’s go-to-guy for powerhouse scenes, Vlad Ivanek), who forces Cristi to finally confront the meaning of what he’s doing and the words he’s using. In the end, and in an ending shot full of such sublime subtlety that it won’t hit you on a single viewing, Cristi presents his “storyboard” of the place he’s been surveying for weeks, and where an utterly useless sting operation will take place after the credits roll. He’s made, in effect, his own movie, the final irony in a film acutely aware of cinema’s two-edged sword: As a weapon of greater awareness, or as a weapon of audience control. No more important ideas can be expressed onscreen, and yet Porimboiu and his Romanian friends are doing it with fluidity, wit and the illusion of supreme ease.

Robert Koehler is a film critic and Director of Programming for this year’s AFI FEST.