Based on true events that took place in 1959, Closer to the Moon follows a daring heist carried out by high-ranking Jewish members of the Romanian Communist Party. In order to execute their robbery the Ioanid gang (or the Rosenthal gang as it is called in the film) members pretended to be shooting a film while being applauded by passers-by and a curious audience. After they were arrested and condemned to death, they were forced by the government to star in a (false) propaganda film about the robbery. The story is told through the eyes of Virgil, who witnessed the robbery while working as a waiter in a café situated across from the bank. Captivated and believing to have witnessed the making of the first Romanian action film, he decides to become a cameraman.
Caranfil’s film is reminiscent of one of the masterpieces of Romanian Cinema, the 1968 black-and-white
The Reenactment by
Lucian Pintilie that also deals, as its title suggests, with a filmed reenactment of a crime. As both films imply, the secret police agency of Communist Romania, the Securitate, went to great lengths in its “revision” of History and in the (re)shooting of it. It is, however, not the only film about the 1959 events. There are two documentaries: the 2004 Great Communist Bank Robbery by
Alexandru Solomon and the highly praised 2001
Reconstruction by Irene Lusztig, the granddaughter of Monica Sevianu (here called Alice).
Caranfil sees the protagonists as fully aware of the sociopolitical absurdity that surrounds them and yet, the director does not give his film any individual point of view, making Virgil, his made-up character a merging point for the other meandering parts of his plot such as the insomniac Securitate official obsessed with finding out the motive of the robbery, the drunken director of the propaganda film or Virgil’s landlord, the anti-bolshevik Jew. With
Closer to the Moon, Caranfil does not contemplate Romania’s past nor is he willing to support one single version of the events he recounts, thus wishing to make a case against manipulation. In that, he has made an audacious yet much nicer, romanticized (especially taking into account the multiple references to the moon) and perhaps even laudatory version of the 1959 events and its consequences. Moreover, there are also many references to Cinema, with which the director further demonstrates his passion for the Seventh Art and pays homage to it every step of the way.
As far as the acting is concerned, the cast, mainly British and comprised of
Vera Farmiga,
Mark Strong,
Harry Lloyd among many others, is evenly exceptional. The technical details as well as
Doina Levinta’s costumes and the choice of music are also top-notch.
All in all, Closer to the Moon, with its tragico-burlesque tone, stellar cast and Caranfil’s new and uncompromising vision is a bold, edifying and marvelous history lesson as well as a courageous contribution not only to the Romanian New Wave but also to cinema in general.