Exciting “Balaur”, 2022, the debut feature film of Octave Chelar (a vinist by profession). In English it translates as “higher law”.

A priestess, a religion teacher, sleeps with a student. A student kills himself. The tape, although inspired by real events, uniquely and subtly forms the essence of this tragedy.

What would be the fatal core of the tragedy? Well, it depends on which plane we place the tragedy. If you place it in a socio-administrative plan, then cases are “resolved”, press statements are given, scapegoats are sought, sick leave is entered. In the spiritual plane, in the plane of internal order, a purely personal encounter with the truth, however, everything is for life and death. And I would say that the fatal core of tragedy is a feverish mixture of suffering and misunderstood high aspirations. High aspirations cannot bear the direction imposed on them by the sharp will of the individual. Driven strictly by the individual, high aspirations remain unreliable and mediocre remedies against worthlessness and confusion.

I was especially convinced by the beginning and end of the film. The film begins with a metaphysical invitation to the conclusion (“Man is free to choose. God did not force man to do anything in advance. He alone decided to eat from the forbidden tree. And then the God who gave this commandment did not do it). it is to limit him or bind him, but to make him immortal, perfect. The commandment offers an alternative that we can choose or not.”) and ends with a sigh in the tomb of the psyche/soul.

The film begins with the Idea, the doctrine, the Way, the Truth and the Life and ends with the defeated bodies (in tattered homemade clothes) of the two men. She stretched out as if in a chest, he, in sports suits, without priestly vestments, closes the white door of the chest to close in his own. Two tall white rooms built like two tombstones. Together to the end in common condemnation. And two icons guarding the movement of two cells. Behind them, she can be heard moaning in agony without end.

The main dragon in the film (marriage triangle) has 3 heads and Chelar acts equidistant from each of them. Throughout the film, each main character reveals his beliefs that guide his life, and it remains for him to prove his existential-metaphysical veracity. Everyone sleeps as they sleep. 1) A teenager, sexually immature (he has many mistresses, of course), greedy for love, neglected, looking for a reason to live, 2) a male priest rooted in the church and family and in his role he fulfills these two traditional institutions: he shares, confesses , confesses, in his grumpy-complex-Orthodox way, to Christ over a dinner he has with his wife and their son, raises his son, checks his homework, visits his parents, defends the way he and his wife have chosen in front of his domineering grandmother , as parents, for the education of their son, sending him to a regular high school and not to a seminary 3) The woman, on the other hand, does not seem to belong to the inner vacuum; he cannot come to terms with the past, nor with his mother, nor with the people he fears and hides from; it does not seem that he can truly give himself in any plane of existence; imitates belonging to the church (wears an ordinary headscarf), and to a man (gives him regular insulin injections), and to faith (beautifully and wisely speaks to the students in the religion lesson about the teachings of Christ), and to vice (shyly steals and wipes a few cigarettes, shyly masturbating in the bath). We see her overcome with incurable sadness. We see her eyes wet and sad as she watches her son sing psalm 33, and when she feels sorry for her student who has been neglected by his mother, and when she has sex with her husband. Although she is the only one who talks about love, freedom and perfection, she seems the least free. Neither the holy, nor lofty ideas, nor sex can cure his sadness and secret rebellion. Catherine is well hidden within herself.

The teenager is intense, restless and fearless, I just saw that he expressed the conviction that you can only be free by abolishing all laws and all restrictions, the priest is complex and dogmatic, but both of them assume the operation of these personal-metaphysical laws to the end. The young nihilist will argue and encourage the dignity of reality (projected as the mother reality) to give it meaning until the final gesture (total self-destruction) is made, while the priest, although defeated and humiliated, will remain with his wife, faithful to the institution of seven eat Two different forms of courage. Dogmatic courage, brazen courage. A woman with her incurable sadness and duality creates them knockout both.

The second big dragon in the movie (also a triangle) also has 3 heads: son, wife and mother-in-law.

Icons always appear among dragon people.

The icon that men give to their mother-in-law on her birthday emphasizes the gravity of their human and spiritual meeting. When the mother-in-law asks who chose the icon, the priest Dragoš, her son, more fickle than in all other scenes of life, gives her an explanation, saying that he chose it and that Ekaterina (the priestess) did not like it because it was too ” shrill and without mystery, also according to the canon.” The priestess would like to present her mother-in-law (her rival) with a less “clear” icon, with “faces erased, like in a moving picture.” As commissioners treat an icon, so they treat life. For priest Dragoš, life, beliefs, loyalty, rites and people are “clear”. Of course, his values ​​carry weight piercing, rigid, dogmatic, like his mother, who gives Katery lessons and tells her: “We are not making these paintings to hang them on the walls in a museum. These icons are analyzed according to certain patterns, written by specialized people, blessed priests, who also know the dogma and what is in the human soul. (And while she dominates her opponent, she takes her submissive husband hostage and ally, faithfully binding him with a precious antipathetic smile).

For Kateryna, the faces of others (and implicitly hers) are like this ANDdeleted, hence the ease with which he instrumentalizes them (and allows himself to be instrumentalized). Instead of being sincere and decisive in her domestic and metaphysical relationship with her difficult husband, she prefers to feign feigned submission.

The actress who played the priestess said she wished the film was a possibility A call for women: “… being aware of the abuses we experience in society or in relationships or in any context, and to stop accepting them, to face them. We need to have that courage and above all make it known. This is the only way we will promote a new model in society and inspire others.”

I also say that the film can be an excuse for A call, but I say it less comfortingly and apologetically. Melina Manovicha managed to play Ekaterina perfectly because she was able to see the victim in the teacher-priestess. The false impression of the character helped Melina Manovica very well to play the role of this non-conflicted, confused and vain woman (I know dogma too!he responds school-wise to his mother-in-law, with whom he enters into fierce competition), who controls him in tender the men in her life. For women – mother, girlfriend, mother-in-law – less; in Chelar’s universe, women are mean to each other. She manipulates a troubled teenager (she betrays his colleague to put him in her car, “scolds” him for physically cornering her, but at the same time ties his lip, offers to give him a ride home), manipulates her by her son (makes him take him to the kitchen to steal his phone, teaches him to lie to his father), stimulated by her student’s precocious manhood, she suddenly transforms into an oppositional teenager who secretly brings home the nihilistic youth’s provocative and passionate ideas, which he wraps in a fake invitation to dialogue; keeping her true motivation a secret, she asks her theologian husband some serious questions about human freedom. Our Orthodox feels that he has been cornered, so he behaves like a closed authoritarian. She then manipulates her colleague (when she runs out of class), the school principal, by implying that his reputation is also at risk (“…He’s a student without a guardian that we know absolutely nothing about. You know the psychologist had to do an evaluation ? Those sheets that you signed, did you put an examination or did you sign them like that, with your eyes closed?”)

In the end, one gets the impression that the author is punishing his characters for the evil they have done to each other. Man is free to chooseWell so we are told in the beginning through the authority of the religious teacher. Not really understanding, the professor of religion from the very beginning draws the basic law according to which everyone will be judged. Everyone will give an account for this unique freedom of choice between good and evil. The cells in which the two men are locked up disappear are their greatest and least faults. Her cell door seems bigger than his. The priest seems to be punished for his stupidity, for his stubbornness, for the despair he fell into: he is in training. Instead of serving in the church, he is locked up with his wife in a post-tragedy domestic hell. The student is punished for his vindictive audacity, for the damage he causes to the woman in love and her family. It seems the only son saved who leaves foreigntits, sent by the teacher chemistry. Out there, in the territory of science and epistemic uncertainty, the spiritual plane does not seem to prevail, nor do the “sins”/evils committed by the parents condemn him. – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro