The battle of the sexes rages on at the Romanian Film Festival

The shockwaves from the fall of the Iron Curtain still course through Romania's contemporary filmmakers, who absorb them with movies that range from tragic to serio-comic. Not surprisingly, this only helps to shake up the old-fashioned tug-of-war between men and women, not to mention some backward attitudes. This week’s fourth annual Romanian Film Festival (running Thursday through Saturday at the Madison Museum Of Contemporary Art) features 11 films covering everything from dead hookers to learning to drive stick while being mugged. Although the festival doesn’t necessarily intend to focus on the theme of changing gender roles and the conflict that comes with them, the films The A.V. Club watched ahead of time included plenty of male behavior that makes your average drunken jock-brah look like a militant feminist.

The Happiest Girl In The World (Friday, 9 p.m.)
High-schooler Delia has won a fancy new sports car in a contest for a juice company, but has to appear in a commercial before she can claim her prize. Her parents dress her up and drive her into Bucharest, the alluring big city full of excitement that her parents cannot wait to escape. Unfortunately for them, production team's bickering and Delia’s awkward acting skills keep delaying the process, causing a 90-second commercial to take an entire hot summer day to shoot. Radu Jude's comedy slowly drags along, resting entirely on the conflicts that emerge as a girl moves from childhood to adulthood, setting the stifling control of Delia’s father against the dangers of city life that he aims to protect her from. These dangers loom in the form of salty, sexist production crew members and cruelly superficial advertising people who pick apart the poor girl’s looks in every shot they review.


Time to call Gloria Steinem: Delia's father tells his wife to fuck off as he presses his daughter to sell the car she won so he can use the money to retire early and pay for Delia’s schooling. When she refuses, he disowns her. When she comes to apologize a bit later, her mother scolds Delia for “making your father cry.” Wait, who’s the asshole here?

The Other Irene (Friday, 7 p.m.)
Irene has a great opportunity to go on a working trip to Cairo in this drama from director Andrei Gruzsniczki, but her husband Aurel begs her not to go. Despite his fears, she returns brimming with energy and enthusiasm a few weeks later, eager to take on mundane marital tasks like sex and dishwasher shopping. But after Irene has to leave unexpectedly for a second trip, she never returns. With its fixation on the power of the woman in the workplace, The Other Irene opens in what seems like a cross-section of changing gender roles in Romania. When Irene disappears, it becomes a pseudo-thriller, as Aurel attempts to assert his dormant masculine dominance over red tape, obstinate in-laws, and Irene’s shady employers in his mission to discover what happened to his wife.
Time to call Gloria Steinem: From the moment he arrives there, Aurel finds something fishy about the office where Irene worked until she disappeared. The filmmakers rub this in with the office's lack of male employees—something has obviously gone horribly wrong when an entire office is missing the Y chromosome.

Shorts (Saturday, 12:30 p.m.)
The four short films on offer at the festival range from painfully artsy exercises to crime-gone-wrong hijinks. "Bric-Brac" follows an actor who struggles with a scene eerily similar to a violent argument he had with his actual girlfriend. The film cuts from the actor’s protests to an ironically well-acted fight with his lady in a similar-looking kitchen. Pretty clever, huh?

If one-note shorts aren’t your thing, "Oli’s Wedding" offers a bit more to chew on. Oli’s father awkwardly meets his daughter-in-law on her wedding day over webcam—it seems Oli rushed the Stateside wedding, and his father couldn’t get a visa in time. The short zeroes in on a depressed yet proud father who will take any small chance he can get to share in his distant son’s life.

While not serious in the least, "Life’s Hard" features some great play with the gender dynamics of Romania. The short is about the odd connection that forms between a young woman heading to work and the mugger who attempts to make off with her purse. It starts high on ugly stereotypes, but in the end the criminal gets what’s coming to him.
Time to call Gloria Steinem: When a cop sees the mugger struggle with the main character in her car in "Life’s Hard, " he knocks on the window of the car and tells them to buckle up and to leave their domestic squabbles at home. The mugger then proceeds to berate the poor woman for not knowing how to get the car in gear while the driver in the car behind them yells, “Get her back in the kitchen!”