'Hooked', the first feature by Romanian director Adrian Sitaru, is a sublime blend of realism and haunting mystery, shot in three weeks and made on a very low budget with astonishing actors who worked for no pay. A bickering couple leave Bucharest for the day to have a picnic in the country, but they accidentally run over a young prostitute on the way and, after some more disagreement and confusion, agree to hide her body in the woods, so that their illicit affair will not be exposed. When the apparently deceased girl (Ana/Violeta) miraculously revives, the couple improvise an unlikely explanation and then agree, while their guard is down, to share their picnic with her. The rest of the film convolutes in ways both comedic and disturbing, as Ana/Violeta (we are not sure which is her real name, if either) plays one half of the couple off against the other in a series of fascinating dialogues in which the girl quickly discovers and exploits the fissures that threaten their relationship. Clarity and mystery proceed apace, as Ana's appearance begins to take on the character of a fated visitation, while the web of lies in which the couple is snarled becomes exposed and they start to hurtle toward some sort of inevitable denouement. The dialogue is delightful; nimble, light, conversational, and at the same time freighted with the load of meanings and half-meanings we scramble to put together as the couple themselves scramble to understand ... it made me slightly light-headed, as if I were drinking champagne, or contemplating the flight of a butterfly, and all this without the benefit of understanding the host of double-entendres and in-jokes which, according to the producers who participated in the Q and A afterwards, had Romanian audiences in stitches. Further, there is deft deployment of symbols at certain junctures which create patterns, nodes and faultlines in the landscape of the film, adding layers of possibility to an already sophisticated study in relationship. The total effect is one of haunting depth in the center of something perfectly light and amusing. There is the matter of the 5 lei, the price of a beer, or of a prostitute; the sharing of the beer bottle, the bonus bottle discovered in the river; the strange payment at the end - for what, by whom, we can hardly say. Then there is the angling, the hooking, the fish/bird dichotemy, the possible drowning. And the strange, blurry, shuffling perspective at the close of the film drops us suddenly, but uncertainly, into the body of this stranger who ultimately conjures for herself a sort of mythic aura, as if she is a djinn or fairy of unknown character and possessed of dubious motives who is nevertheless caught in the slightly demonic loop of a weird Romanian folk tale. It is such a perfect film, there is very little can compare with it, but it did bring to mind the stunning 2007 'Runaway Horse' from German director Rainer Kaufmann; both films focus on the problems of relationship, both bring together the strange and the familiar in charming, disarming ways. The latter is more sophisticated, and very funny, but Kaufmann has several features to his name and a budget, as well as the benefit of an already realized story in the original novella by Martin Walser. Sitaru is barely out of the gate, and has written as well as directed this brilliant debut. At the other end of the pleasure spectrum, that is, in the utterly dismal category, is Spanish director Jaime Rosales' horrible 'experimental' offering, 'Bullet in the Head'. Billed as a thriller which "will leave you stunned and gasping for breath", this quasi-silent film was the most banal, the most dreary and infuriating thing I have ever had the misfortune to see. For the first half of the film I employed my otherwise 'stunned' brain in counting the number of people who walked out - over 50, which left about 400 diehards gazing uncomprehendingly at the screen, fidgeting in our seats, whispering, chuckling, sighing, and rattling bags of chips, as we came to terms with the fact that we were not about to start enjoying this film any time soon. The short version of the catalogue blurb did not prepare us for the fact that the entire film was shot, to use Rosales' words, in the manner of "a wildlife documentary", with telephoto lenses and no audio equipment, or rather, only a short-range mic which picked up the less-than-interesting ambient sounds of traffic in the north of Spain. Lips were seen to move, but we did not hear a word throughout the entire film, except at one crucial part, by which time we couldn't care less. And to compound our misery, there were several long stretches where we were treated to the view of the back of our character's head; some minutes at the ATM, for example, at a magazine kiosk, a cafeteria and, in a dully ironic twist, at a listening station in the record store. These scenes were punctuated by more lively segments where people ate sandwiches and wandered around, drove, parked, met other people and said things. Then the 'main characters' shot a couple of cops in a parking lot and drove away with their colleague. It was a sort of cross between your worst Andy Warhol film and John Cage's 4'33", only more boring. Don't bother with this one.
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