Jeremy Malies in Romania
30 May 2024
“No quote from Schopenhauer ever raised a penis.” Well, the authors of the Kinsey Report stressed the many ways in which an act of congress can be ignited and quite a few are sketched out here. But you would guess that playwright Mona Donici is on safe ground with her assertion.
Imagine a set of Alan Bennett “Talking Head” monologues combined with the film Magnolia but with the latter’s Aimee Mann soundtrack replaced by Erik Satie. That is a fair idea of scope if not tone here. Director Kocsárdi Levente drip-feeds us information and initially I thought we were in a single big asylum with the inmates showing solidarity one with another, but Donici is recreating individual loneliness in which people often imagine they have companions.
Most touching (and convincing) is Ilona Fall as an 84-year-old grande dame of the theatre. Her star has waned and, hard up, she vegetates on the fourth floor of a stinking elevatorless Communist apartment, even telling us ruefully that there is now a Facebook group for people in her predicament.
Demented, she stares out of the flats endlessly and examines the vegetation, at one point imagining that she is a giraffe. With an inspired touch, videographer Sebastian Hamburger switches the viewpoint of his projections so we are indeed at tree level, putting us inside the woman’s head as Florian Zeller does with his elderly characters.