CHILDREN UNDERGROUND
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Director: Edet Belzberg Writer: (Documentary) Cast: Mihai, Marian, Ana, Cristina, Macarena
A colleague of mine who visited Eastern Europe reserved his harshest criticism for Romania which, he said, was a country completely ruined by the Communists. He gave a heaven-hell contrast between that states and the far more prosperous Hungary, which had been the freest and most prosperous of the so-called Soviet satellite nations. As you look at Edet Belzberg's pictures of Bucharest filmed eleven years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, you may wonder about that fellow's reproach, but then Bezlberg concentrated on the small area surrounding one of the Underground stations which could be the equivalent of New York's Fifth Avenue or London's Picadilly Circus. When the director shifts to a home in the countryside, however, you can see stark poverty. The residence of one family is just a couple of steps removed from a tar-paper shack such as you see all over the Third World, with barely enough room to house a single person much less a family.
Belzberg, however, is not concerned about the capital's topography but hones in instead on a group of five children who live on the street in the much the way the homeless live in New York City, with one exception: these throwaway kids, products of former Romanian dictator Ceausesceu's program in outlawing both abortions and contraception in order to increase the work force, do not mope around in the isolated style of New York's adult unfortunates but band together with a kind of camaraderie that makes you accept their decision to prefer the street with their friends to the houses of the sometimes abusive parents.
The toughest of the crew, the kind of person that not even a mother would any longer be interested in (to say nothing of a prospective adoptive couple in America) is 16-year-old Cristina. Cristina left an abusive home and now, at age 16, has shaved her head in order to look like a tough boy rather than a attractive girl "so nobody will take advantage of me." Being the oldest, she bosses around Mihai (age 12), Marian (age 8), Ana (age 10) and Macarena (age 14), slapping them around if they do not keep their cardboard homes neat or if they steal from the merchants in the subway station. She is the sort that might hold her own even were she among some of the street gangs of L.A., priding herself on hitting aggressors back unmercifully.
Maracarena, also a young woman, is not nearly as tough. Debilitated like the others from sniffing paint in paper bags--which the kids do not only to get high but to ameliorate their hunger--she often cries and on at least one occasion walks around the Bucharest area dazed and confused mumbling that her parents live in a foreign country and that she cannot access them because she lacks a passport.
Perhaps the only one that some rich American might want to adopt is 12-year-old Mihai, the most likely to be rehabilitated by the shelters of Bucharest. He regrets principally his failure to be schooled and adopts eagerly to any instruction he gets, whether from a more or less formal style of education or from the social workers who take an interest in him. In order to be enrolled in school, he needs his identity papers but despite the attempt of a social worker to get the document from his parents, his mother, who holds the paper up in much the way former Senator Joe McCarthy held up a list of 57 "top Communists in the State Department," insists that the helper must wait until Monday when the copy stores are open so that she can clone the document. It never arrives, indicating that the parents would rather that their kid starve or die on the streets than get help. At one point Mihai slashed his arm with a blade when he follows a companion to a park which was not the place he asked to visit.
Belzberg's documentary style is fascinating. Eschewing the familiar talking heads technique, she avoid narration as well, allowing her young people to act as they usually would. Darned if these street people didn't go about their daily routines--sniffing paint, helping some of the merchants in return for money, in one case sitting on a train while a fellow passengers questions him--as though the camera were invisible! Belzberg captures the ensemble of unfortunates without lumping them together but rather punctuates their individuality and their separate conditions. While most seem to have been abandoned, in one case, that of Ana and Maria, their stepfather insists that he would like the kids to remain at home, that he never beats them, but that there is simply not enough money to keep them in the style they may wish. They regularly run away from the provincial area back to the street and their more understanding friends.
While Belzberg implicitly indicts the former Communist leader for his priorities in prohibiting abortion and contraception, in one case a worn-out woman insists that life was better under Ceausescu because she had a guaranteed job. When the free market arrived in Romania she was laid off and has barely enough to survive. "Children Underground" is a searing portrait of a poor country, some of whose abandoned children have hope of rehabilitation while others will probably die on the street of drug overdose or beatings.
Not Rated. Running time: 108 minutes. (C) 2001 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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