(Cea mai fericita fata din lume)
Directed by Radu Jude
99 minutes
In Romanian with English subtitles  

The movies of Romanian director Radu Jude have been causing quite a stir and controversy for the last decade. His movies are always absurd and biting satires exposing the emotional underpinning of how our society works—what makes it tick. His movies can be scathing with their precision… seeing the traps of both Romania's previous communist system, but also their present free-market capitalism as well.

In a way this is a summer film, since the story takes place in Bucharest during a record-breaking heat wave. It's set in contemporary Romania, and focuses on a teenage girl who wins a new car by sending in labels to a local soft drink contest. Often with such situations a gift often ends up being a nightmare, and that's the case here. 

Of course the entire contest is just a publicity stunt, and the young girl is forced to participate in making a commercial for the soft drink company in exchange for getting the car. And it's here that the film becomes claustrophobic—the young girl is thrown into the crass world of marketing, and is expected to act cheerful. The small film company hired to shoot the commercial is harassed as much as the girl, with their client (the boss of the company) is breathing down their necks and ordering them what to do.

This flick is based on a true story director Radu Jude experienced earlier in his life, when he got a job to make a commercial... including the sadness of the teenage girl. The movie also hits the nail on the head of a certain zeitgeist in the former Eastern bloc where many pent-up people feel they missed out on the capitalist gangbang and want desperately to make up for lost time. Of course what they 'missed' was mostly a pipe-dream, and the director exposes this situation with a shrewd wit. Almost the entire film was shot outdoors in the streets and main squares of Bucharest, where ironically everything of beauty is from the past. We see how the city is being filled with modern corporate buildings, tourism, advertisements, and trashy objects like plastic portable toilets.  

Don't expect any big action sequences, complicated story, or even emotionally-charged dramatic scenes. The film could even be called minimalist in a way. It's amazing how, with such stripped down simplicity, director Radu Jude is able to tackle such a wide range of cringe-worthy aspects of our modern world. For example, with just the smallest details—the things his characters say with all their hypocrisy and pettiness—the director is able to expose the immensity of our human tragedy. And let's be clear, the situations he depicts are only painful because they are so recognizable. Fantastic flick that gives us a lot to reflect on.