THALASSA, THALASSA! RETURN TO THE SEA
A film review by Shane R. Burridge
Copyright 1996 Shane R. Burridge
(1994) 89m.
Children's film from Romania like no other - if it is a children's film. It's a little hard to tell, although I can imagine the concept of the story would be quite appealing to young viewers. Simple plot depicts the journey of seven Romanian children from their arid village to the coast 40 kilometers away (I won't spoil things by saying how). This is almost a Romanian STAND BY ME - as with all road movies, the journey is more significant than the destination - but it's light years away from anything Hollywood would come up with.
The portrayal of children in cinema has been a long-running bone of contention for me - they're always precocious, articulate, or cute. In short, they're always acting. And it's pretty hard for children to act like children when their lines are written by adults. THALASSA brings to the screen the most natural representation of children I can remember seeing - everything they say or do is so real it'll make you wonder if you were really like that at their age. You were. And their world of logic is so abstruse it ultimately pervades the structure of the story. It's almost as if writer-director Bogdan Dumitrescu has let his child actors choose the direction and events of his film - it certainly has an improvisational feel to it. But these kids aren't the typically cute ensemble we've seen in countless other films. Their natures are capricious and arbitrary. They switch allegiances to each other and think primarily of themselves, and they take absolutely nothing seriously. As story progresses, film takes on surreal overtones - the landscape is blasted and desolate; the children dress in oversized clothes looted from a suitcase; and in separate instances, a couple of the characters simply drop out of the story - their disappearances are never explained, although we may be right to suspect violence.
It's worth bearing in mind that 100,000 orphans were still being relocated around Romania at the time this film was conceived - Dumitrescu may be taking a shot at the bureaucratical procrastination which left a few thousand children contracting the AIDS virus in substandard institutions. His cast is as carefree and scruffy as any group of street kids we would care to imagine. Film doesn't really have any feel-good moments until the ambiguous ending, which makes us realize that no matter how much some children go through, the only thing they really live for is the moment. Does this trivialize the rest of the film? Who cares. By the time they're openly celebrating you'll be just as unconcerned about consequence as they are. Worth showing in a classroom, if only for the lively discussion which is sure to follow.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews