Minutes before the Hong Kong International Film Festival screening
of a (supposedly sold out) screening of The New Year That Never Came
The New Year That Never Came (Romania, 2024)
- Bogdan Muresanu, director-scriptwriter
- Starring: Adrian Vancica, Nicoleta Hancu, Emilia Dobrin, Iulian Postelnicu, Mihai Calin, Andrei Miercure
- Part of the HKIFF's Global Vision program
There are films that start off brightly but end up disappointingly. There also are movies that take awhile to properly get going, but then just keep getting better and better; sometimes because they are ensemble works with a number of characters to get to know and resonate so much more after one starts caring for them, and the situations they find themselves in.
Among the examples of the latter cinematic offerings is that which is my favourite film of all time. As is The New Year That Never Came. And it's indeed a tribute to this 2024 Romanian ensemble film that I am comparing it to Peking Opera Blues (Hong Kong, 1986), and favorably too!
Set in Bucharest in December 1989, the lives of six different people play out in ways that they could have scarce imagined just a few months, weeks or days before thanks to the end of Nicolae Ceausescu's rule being far closer to taking place than they thought possible. Of course we who are aware of the history facts and/or were alive when the totalitarian state he presided over fell know this; but rather than making the dramatic proceedings boringly predictable, it actually becomes all the more interesting to see how bad things still were, and how scary they could be, pretty much up until the end for folks from various walks of life.
The New Year That Never Came came out of director-scriptwriter Bogdan Muresanu's The Christmas Gift, a 2018 short film that "evoked a child’s-eye view of political terror via an inadvertent act of protest". There's a nod in this feature length film to this by way of a child's letter to Santa Claus containing a line about "Uncle Nick" that causes his father, Gelu (portrayed by Adrian Vancica), to comically but also understandably freak out and worry that he will get into big trouble.
Gelu also happens to work in a TV studio where trouble brews too for TV show producer Stefan (played by Mihai Calin): professionally, by way of a leading actress in his latest production having suddenly defected and consequently needing to be replaced; and personally by way of his university student son, Laurentiu (essayed by Andrei Miercure), having plans of his own to flee the country. Gelu appears as well in the lives of Margareta (played by Emilia Dobrin), a disenchanted former Communist Party member, and her cop/secret service officer son, Ionut (portrayed Iulian Postelnicu), who appears cool at work but less so in the presence of the two main women in his life: his wife; and, especially, his mother.
A working class "nobody", Gelu turns out to be the one of the six characters in focus with the most consequential part to play in The New Year That Never Comes. But Nicoleta Hancu, the actress playing an actress, it is who has the showiest role; as her Florina wears her heart on her sleeve and is, among other things, the most visibly affected by news of a massacre in another Romanian town that seeps into Bucharest by way of such as Radio Free Europe (hear that, Donald Trump?) and openly upset about having to do things she finds morally disagreeable, even reprehensible.
Seeing what the often fearful, upset and unhappy characters face and deal with in their fairly mundane lives makes the end scenes of this historical tragicomedy so very satisfying. And if you have lived or are living through similar periods of repression in your home territory, they are downright inspirational as well as wonderfully cathartic.
More than by the way, it's worth pointing out that The New Year That Never Came being screened at the Hong Kong International Film Festival this year can seem like a minor miracle. This all the more so when reports have emerged in recent days that Iranian filmmaker and fest favorite Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig (France-Germany-Iran, 2024) appears to be the latest film to be banned in Hong Kong.
My rating for this film: 9.0
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