by Walter T. Runn

Created on: June 10, 2010

Going Against The Norm

Walking out of the theater after watching the film Avatar, I heard many praises about the visuals of the film, but ceaseless criticisms on the narrative story and structure of the film. The most articulate comment I heard was “Avatar is basically Pocahontas and Dances With Wolves with machines, robots, and large blue people.” Sadly, this comment is very true. Though a visually spectacular world is created in the world of the film, complete with fantastic creatures, exotic plants, and beautiful scenery, the story has been told many times before; a foreign person of a different race or background somehow becomes chosen by a native people group, like the Native Indians in Pocahontas and the Na'vi in Avatar, as someone they can trust and invite into their tribe, only to face the consequence of a cold betrayal, but everything is resolved in the end with an overrated “Happily Ever After” tag attached to it.

I began recalling the films that have been released in the past few years; Step Up: The Streets, Push, Star Trek, etc. Many of the films that came in mind were placed in the cliché category in my mind for two different reasons: either the story itself has been told before, or the film heavily relies on a happily-ever-after ending. I have come to realize that I was able to predict the whole movie in my mind almost at the beginning of most films. This epiphany troubled me greatly. As a film student, I do not want to make or even study films that have basically been made before. Around this time of panic and slight depression, I came across a film called 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days by the director Cristian Mungiu. This film was like nothing like I had ever seen before. The camera movements, narrative and plot structure, cinematography, and the fact that everything in the film was diegetic, which are elements of a film that are a part of the story, and nothing was non-diegetic, like background music, left me excited and impressed with the uniqueness of the film.

After doing some research, I found that this film is a part of a current film movement known as the Romanian New Wave. Though I tried to conduct a personal research on this movement, I was not as successful as I would have liked to due to its recent birth. Professor Jennifer VanderHeide, a film professor at Calvin College, informed me of a research that traces this film movement to its roots, the most important of which are the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism.

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