In the name of hermeneutics
You may have probably heard that there is something about football going on in Brazil. FIFA World Cups are perfectly structured festivals, just like a football game could be regarded as film – one hour and a half (usually), suspense (or not), lesson learned plus mass emotional involvement. Still, if you are one of those people who would compare watching soccer to experiencing Romanian cinema, we have got you covered – Yoana Pavlova analyzes Corneliu Porumboiu’s THE SECOND GAME / AL DOILEA JOC (2014), recent winner at the Romanian Days section of Transilvania IFF and a must-see for football fans.
THE SECOND GAME / AL DOILEA JOC (2014) by Corneliu Porumboiu appears 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Revolution, as Romanians call the events at the end of 1989. This provocative project turns up in the playful company of other Romanian documentaries, whose narrative and tactics rely heavily on archive materials from the socialist era – THE FOREST / PADUREA/SUMA (2014) by Siniša Dragin was awarded Most Innovative Film at Visions du Réel a few weeks ago, while THE BUCUREȘTI EXPERIMENT / EXPERIMENTUL BUCURESTI (2013) by Tom Wilson won last year at Transilvania IFF. It feels like the need to recapitulate one-generation span is urging filmmakers to go further into the past and look beyond the evident, to reenact history in hope for a better future.
THE SECOND GAME’s premise is simple – the director and his father watch “fair play” style (no pausing or rewinding) the grainy TV footage of a match Porumboiu Sr. once refereed. At the time Adrian Porumboiu had to decide whether the Dinamo — Steaua derby should take place in the heavy snowfall on December 3rd, 1988, he was 38. At the time Corneliu Porumboiu records his father reflecting on that game, 25 years later, he is 38. Their commentary does not bear any resemblance to the frantic volubility of sports journalists, yet the naïvistic charm of the sound background, with all buzzes and brief phone conversations, adds to the film’s complexity in a surprising manner. If you have seen enough Romanian films from the New Wave, you can almost imagine the living room where the two are sitting, however, this would be an illusion – a brief check shows that at this point Adrian Porumboiu is one of the richest people in the country, and millionaires generally do not appear in contemporary Romanian cinema, neither do their living rooms. Well, THE BUCUREȘTI EXPERIMENT is a small exception, even if deliberately deceiving.
What strikes us as well, listening to THE SECOND GAME’s audiogram, is the apparent nostalgia – for the rules of the game back then, for the former sportsmanship, for the analogue methods of arbitration, for the dead or for the ones whose lives changed tragically in the post-1989 era. There is even an element of environmental sentimentality because of the snowfall that seems to be so rare today in Bucharest. On the other side, we are quickly being introduced to the context of the political regime of which the two invisible spectators / actors do not hold any tender memories – with the trivia that Dinamo and Steaua represented in fact the army and the secret police, as well as with the explanation about the satellite teams in the football league and their purpose. Moreover, the conversation deconstructs the propaganda touch of the TV broadcast, from the way cameras were positioned around the stadium to the cuts during quarrels on the pitch or injuries treatment. So, when Porumboiu Sr. clarifies the idea of the “flexible diagonal” in the referee’s practice, we start to wonder whether and how did he apply it off the pitch. Just like when we perceive the whole setting and the father-son debate as triumph of banality, but what is the first word that comes to mind after mentioning “banality”? Alas, it is “evil”.
Then comes the (rather obvious) connection between football and dictatorship, not simply due to the fact that Valentin Ceaușescu, the first-born son of Nicolae Ceaușescu, assembled the team of Steaua. As Adrian Porumboiu sums up: “Big egos were involved”. In a state system that was collective-oriented and non-competitive (excluding shock-workers) by definition, football was the ideal way to channel some good old individualistic ambition. Besides, after decades of excessive investments and talents scouting in the field of sports in the ex-Eastern Block, the results were finally visible in the 1980s, when many local teams contested the UEFA Champions League Cup, or as it was called in the past – the European Champion Clubs’ Cup. Porumboius’ improvised rerun reminds that sport was one of socialism’s favorite propaganda tools, the only framework in which the concept of “stars” was acceptable. Foreign currency too. And, paradoxically or not, the film adds another level of nostalgia for the times when football was not just “fast food” but put on a pedestal as a celebration of the non-everyday, of the non-politicized sphere of pre-1989 existence.
Nevertheless, THE SECOND GAME shies away from easy generalizations. The film works around one of socialism’s favorite clichés that family is the smallest unit of society and plays the real magic of Romanian cinema – under the pretext of father-son talk surfaces the multifaceted portrait of two different generations, along with Corneliu Porumboiu obsession for autoreferentiality. Every time I interviewed Romanian directors, including THE SECOND GAME’s author (Sarajevo, 2009), I was impressed how humorously they explain their parents’ reactions to the New Wave films, yet the desire to be approved has been always present, just like the impulse to criticize older generations. In Corneliu Porumboiu documentary this dynamic catalyzes the funniest episode in the dialogue, when the son questions his father’s decisions on the pitch, and the latter questions the filmmaking devices of Romanian cinema’s wunderkind. Fortunately, Corneliu Porumboiu is a director and his father – a referee, not vice versa.
If you are a film industry professional, you can watch THE SECOND GAME on Festival Scope