It feels like there’s an avalanche of Romanian movies descending over us during this year, with productions catering to all tastes – the dubious (Buzz House), the mainstream (Anul nou care nu a fost) and the art-house (Trei kilometri până la capătul lumii). Clara would probably fit in the latter. It is a distinctly European movie that goes heavy on social concerns. It also feels as dry as the summertime dreams that leave you gasping for water. While highly relatable, its relatability is both a weakness and a strength. Director Sabin Dorohoi explores important and familiar themes based on Ruxandra Ghitescu’s script, however without making the story distinctive enough.
There is such a thing as movie being too sober for its own good. It’s the case of Clara, which tells a mother’s tale of woe, as she has to balance working abroad with caring for her son back home. When the latter disappears, the precariousness of her existence comes to the fore and she is forced to reevaluate her choices, juggling pressures from her family, her employer and social welfare institutions. The backdrop, the sinuous Danube flowing around Southern Romania, provides vistas that make for good cinema, in the style of nature’s cold indifference to human travails.
Olga Török plays the lead in a bilingual role (German/Romanian), a modern woman faced with impossible choices. Her interactions with the children are at the core of what emotion the movie brings. Ionut, her son, played by Luca Puia, (a bit of a Milo Machado-Graner lookalike, from Anatomy of a Fall) and her employer’s daughter, Johanna (Elina Leitl) are at different ages with different demands, part of the harsh reality that Clara has to come to terms with. It doesn’t help that her father (Ovidiu Crişan) supports as much as undermines her, the kind of ambivalent relationship that stems from unreconciled expectations. At the same time, her ex-husband leads his life in the UK, with his new family, further adding to the sense of inequity Ionut harbours.
The story bears the weight of countless real life examples, a weight under which it frequently falters into mundane existentialism. There are next to no chuckles to be had, with colourless characters and witless dialogue creating that heavy atmosphere of bureaucratic arrested development. Thereby the movie highlights societal pressures and constraints that someone like Clara has to endure, to the point that she becomes a ghost in her own life.
For me, however, the sterile environment doesn’t allow for much of an emotional connection. The story gets too much of a surface treatment, with Clara a placeholder for so many other people – a more pretentious person might say archetypal – and little individuality. She goes through life with head down, because that’s the cards she feels life has given her. Yet, in the wait it plays out, while her predicament is sorrowful, it doesn’t elicit compassion or, at the very least, frustration. Rather, there’s a sense of demure and mindful nodding that accompanies her attempts to readjust the course of her life. I would have wished for more. 6
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