There’s a moment in Corneliu Porumboiu’s “The Second Game,” which is screening in New York on Sunday as part of the Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema program at the Film Society at Lincoln Center, when the director’s father, with whom his son is having a conversation we’re eavesdropping on, amends a series a comments he has just made regarding their home country, Romania. “Anyway, these things are past history now,” he says. “They’re not interesting to anyone.”
The father’s words provide a laugh for those viewers who are familiar with the son’s work. Porumboiu’s films, like many of those associated with the Romanian New Wave, deal with a country struggling through the aftermath of a revolution. In December 1989, riots and protests erupted in the streets and helped bring down the regime led by Nicolae Ceaușescu, ending more than four decades of Communist rule in the country (Andrei Ujică’s documentary “The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu” is essential viewing on the topic). Porumboiu’s first feature film, “12:08 East of Bucharest,” deals with this moment directly — during a local television broadcast, an alcoholic school teacher and a retired old man, the only two guests the pompous talk show host can gather for his program, debate what actually happened on the night Ceaușescu fled his palace.
We never get a straight answer. But Porumboiu’s subsequent films show us the result, presenting a portrait of a country on the brink of absurdity. “Police, Adjective” (2009) is a low-key procedural thriller where the main character, questioning the case he is working on, is forced to sit there while his boss pages through a dictionary parsing the definitions of words like “conscience” and “police.” In “When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism” (2013), Porumboiu turns the camera on himself, in a way, using the surrogate character of filmmaker as a self-reflexive jab at the narrative and formal conventions of the work he and his peers are making. The main character waxes poetic about his film to lure the main actress into bed, only deciding late in the process that what he’s making is a political film, and Porumboiu constructs the most constraining aesthetic structure around the action through a series of long, static compositions. Through its rigorousness the film veers towards farce, and in turn questions if narrative filmmaking is somehow not the right mode for looking at the past through the present tense.
Again, no straight answers. But it’s telling that Porumboiu would follow “When Evening Falls” with “The Second Game,” a quasi-essay film that escapes fiction altogether while developing around the filmmaker’s most constraining formal construction yet. What we see on the screen is a 25-year-old soccer game on fuzzy VHS tape between Steaua and Dinamo, two rival Romanian teams. Over the game, whose action we can barely follow because of the quality of the footage, is a conversation between Porumboiu and his father, who we learn was one of the referees of the game we’re watching. Memories of the match quickly turn to the truth that is hiding beneath the sporting event — mainly, that Porumbiou’s father had received death threats before the game, and the two teams we’re watching represent the Army and Secret Police.
What emerges is a surprisingly watchable allegory, where the blur of videotape noise and the constant stream of snow falling down on the playing field are a scrim for the corruption just on the other side of the images. The conversation between father and son unspools at a glacial pace, often with no words spoken for what seems like great lengths of time, and you’re left watching and wondering about the vast amount of people at the game and if they realized, then and now, that what was happening right in front of their eyes was partly fiction.
Through his detachment from narrative filmmaking, Porumbiou has in some ways circled back to the beginning. “The Second Game” is as direct a critique of the state of Romania as “12:08 East of Bucharest.” The filmmaker is saying the same thing, just finding new ways to communicate it.
