When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
(Când se lasa seara peste Bucuresti sau metabolism)
$12 Special Event Tickets
With Diana Avramut, Bogdan Dumitrache, Mihaela Sirbu.
Romania/France, 2013, 35mm, color, 89 min.
Romanian with English subtitles.
In the self-reflexive tradition of Beware a Holy Whore, Day for Night or The Stunt Man, Porumboiu’s third feature foregrounds the games people play with each other on and around the set during the making of a movie. Here, the emphasis is on the relationship between actor and director as the private rehearsals between filmmaker Paul and actress Alina slide toward what seems to be seduction, although the motives and stakes for each person remain elusive. When Evening Falls on Bucharest is meant to be as oblique as a real person, and as opaque as its characters, with Porumboiu masterfully wielding the frame, the long take and the use of offscreen space to set up a game between what we know and what we think we know, what we see and what we realize we want to see.