7/10
I've been enjoying Romanian films and particularly Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective lately, so I went back to the director's first film. The original Romanian title is "A fost sau n-a fost?" which loosely translated means "Was there or wasn't there?", the question referring to central focus of the movie - if there really was a revolution in the small town of Vaslui, and if it took place before 12:08pm, the moment dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu fled. Like Police, Adjective, the film is dissection of minutae - of language, things we take for granted, assumptions, unquestioned beliefs etc. It's not quite as quietly devastating as Adjective (12:08 is more black comedy) but it's definitely cut from the same cloth, which is a good thing.
The film has an interesting structure, focusing on the lives of three characters who eventually come together for the last half of the film on a television program debate about whether there was a revolution or not. I was having a hard time getting interested in the characters at first but the debate (which takes up about the last 45 minutes of the film or so) was compelling enough as to almost make me want to go back and rewatch the first half. Sometimes I felt the film was "too Romanian" and some of it was flying over my head but it still hooked me in the end.
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