by Augustin Cupșa

At a time when some film authors made total compromises and fell into line with the socialist realism of the post-1947 years, others were marginalized (Victor Iliu, or Jean Georgescu), and still others sought, later on, refined forms of aesthetic opposition (Lucian Pintilie, Dan Pița), Malvina Urșianu stands as a figure apart, as a formula of aesthetic resistance.

She first graduated from the experimental directing course taught by Jean Georgescu, then served as his assistant director on the commissioned documentaries Petrolul (Oil, 1949) and Pădurile (The Forests, 1950), and afterwards on the commissioned features În sat la noi (In Our Village, dir. Jean Georgescu, Victor Iliu, 1951), Mitrea Cocor (dir. Victor Iliu and Marietta Sadova, 1952), and Nepoții gornistului (The Bugler’s Grandsons, dir. Dinu Negreanu, 1953). Formed in the style of the masters Jean Georgescu and Victor Iliu (selected for the Cannes Film Festival with La moara cu noroc / The Mill of Good Luck, 1955), Malvina Urșianu would change direction toward a politically adapted modernism.

Before taking the step toward her first film as director, she contributed to the screenplay of the feature Bijuterii de familie (Family Jewels, dir. Marius Teodorescu, 1958), a strict adaptation of the eponymous novella from the serial novel Cronică de familie (Family Chronicle) by Petru Dumitriu, a controversial writer in the history of Romanian literature. Pampered by the political regime in his youth, a close associate of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the leader of the PCR, and of Gheorghe Maurer, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, with whom he regularly played tennis, he ended up fleeing to the West and being declared an enemy of the Securitate and the PCR, while at the same time being repudiated by the intellectual diaspora in Paris, led by Monica Lovinescu and Mircea Eliade.

By then, Malvina Urșianu had received, by political commission, the task of adapting another novella from the same novel, Vânt de martie (March Wind), foregrounding the confrontation between landowners and oppressed peasants in March 1945, when the nationalization of land and estates took place. It was a burning subject for the director: herself from a family of landowners, she comes to recognize her parents’ furniture in a warehouse of film props. At the time, the diluvian novel Cronică de familie was intensely used by the PCR to illustrate the decline of the bourgeoisie and the boyar class, losing sight of the fact that, although the bourgeoisie was criticized, the hero of the working class was utterly absent from the novel, while the peasants, in the little they appeared, were presented as troglodytes, driven by animal instincts and capable of murder over any scrap of land. It seems that Malvina Urșianu, too, failed to sense the danger of an adaptation too literary for its own good. The screenplay passed the political censorship of the DGTP, but filming was halted after roughly 60% of the material, for the simple reason that the characters of the boyar class and the aristocracy had too refined an air, while the peasants came off in an unfavourable light. Olga Tudorache said in an interview that it was rather a technical matter—only the part with the boyars had been shot, the peasants’ reality remaining to be filmed. In truth, we must admit that Petru Dumitriu’s novel is not what it seems; it had no propagandistic intentions like others (Drum fără pulbere, Pasărea furtunii, etc.). At last, Malvina Urșianu finds herself dragged into an “exposure session” at the Buftea studios, then interrogated in the Securitate cellars at Uranus on the charge of “ideological sabotage.” “The film Vânt de primăvară [Spring Wind], written by MALVINA URŞIANU, the wife of PAUL ANGHEL, for which she collected 40,000 lei and on which the entire period of organization and rehearsal had been spent, and filming had been begun. After nearly half the film—by which point, in directorial terms, the boyar class had come out very well, the peasants had come out as troglodytes, and the party secretary completely contrary to the principle of our conception—MALVINA URŞIANU was stopped from carrying on the film. But the sum of around 2,000,000 lei had been spent all the same…” (note from C.N.S.A.S., “I” Collection, file no. 138681, vol. 4, ff. 108–144, 27 January 1963; Andrei Călăraşu in the newspaper Adevărul).

After eight years of exclusion from the Buftea sound stages, Malvina Urșianu would return with the film Gioconda fără surâs (The Mona Lisa Without a Smile, 1968). Only auteur films would follow, most of them presented on the Cinepub website, Trecătoarele iubiri (Fleeting Loves, 1974), Întoarcerea lui Lăpușneanu Vodă (The Return of Voivode Lăpușneanu, 1980), Figuranții (The Extras, 1987). Călin Căliman calls her “the grand dame of auteur cinema,” a unique case in the history of Romanian cinema and a rare one on the international stage.

Each of these films — be they historical, period, or war films, or ones of social actuality — treats, in its own particular way, the author’s obsessive theme: the heroine who suffers from the trauma of abandonment, of exclusion, and, above all, of political injustice. After so many detours and tangents from the subject, O lumină la etajul 10 (A Light on the 10th Floor) is the film in which Malvina Urșianu confronts head-on her own life experience and the suffering she went through. Made in 1985, in the decade of maximum Ceaușescu-era oppression, one might say the director was playing with fire. Fortunately, she pulled it off.

The action unfolds between the winter of 1965 and the spring of 1966, up to the eve of the workers’ First of May. Not by chance does the period coincide with Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rise to the head of the PCR and of the country—a period of ideological “thaw,” of the easing of political oppression and of a drawing-closer between leaders and people, a moment when the entire world was pinning its hopes on a winding progression toward freedom and democracy. The film’s heroine is Maria Dinu (Irina Petrescu), released from prison on New Year’s Eve. On the last day of the year, a presidential amnesty was customarily granted for certain categories of prisoners. “The Party’s Ninth Congress has made it a point of honour to do away with all the abuses of the past,” the radio announced. Maria Dinu is an engineer at the industrial combine who served a sentence unjustly, the victim of a conspiracy at her workplace in which the main culprits are her former boyfriend, Stamate (Eusebiu Ștefănescu), and a fellow engineer, Dobrescu. They knowingly altered the production batches, and the woman became the scapegoat in an unjust trial.

The parallel with the author’s own biography holds. While Malvina Urșianu was accused of “ideological sabotage,” Maria Dinu was found guilty of “economic sabotage.” The defence lawyer was the charismatic Mihai Mitrana (Gheorghe Dinică), who had not forgotten her and finds the woman a studio flat on the 10th floor of a block on the edge of the city, where the forests of reinforced concrete were rising with great momentum. With his discreetly ironic smile—a registered trademark of Gheorghe Dinică—and steps that seem danced through a dusty world, literally and figuratively, the lawyer Mitrana fits the mould of the “good cop with serious vices” that Hollywood brought into the mainstream in the ’90s. In the grey native landscape, he is a subtle saboteur of the socialist order, for he has the natural gift of submitting to no rigidity of any kind. Life through the courtrooms and the miseries of existence have given him a permanently cynical air, but in his soul he is profoundly empathetic. He takes care not to show it, lest he too be moved beyond measure. He prefers to slip among the others, appearing and disappearing without too many words, improvising and, more than that, inventing simple joys for a lonely and wronged woman like Maria Dinu. It is not in his nature to feel pity—but neither does the engineer give anyone occasion to feel it for her. She thanks her former good colleagues and the combine’s management, who find themselves obliged to rehabilitate her and acknowledge her merits, with icy coldness; and her former boyfriend Stamate—now remarried to the sister of a high activist, Comrade Gheorghe—she simply throws out of the house when he comes to tell her that “the past is a dead thing, as what’s-his-name put it.”

In their place, two men make their appearance in her almost empty studio flat, each particular in his own way. The lawyer Mitrana turns up at her door without ever warning her, takes her along to a New Year’s party in the mountains on her very first night of freedom, takes her to the cinema and to bars, and gives her cognac to drink when they have nothing left to eat. His life is completely blown apart; he eats wherever he can, sleeps who knows where, has a wife who at one point leaves home, suspicious of the relationship taking hold between him and the beautiful engineer.

The other man appears at the window, on the scaffolding—it is the worker Trică (Mircea Dinică), with an altogether different air, a simple peasant who works in construction and pines for his household and his family. And as he keeps laying on the trowel and listening to football matches on the radio, he comes to grow close to the engineer. It is more a solidarity among the excluded, the woman lost in the working-class district of tower blocks, and the young man torn from his family, his land, and his customs.

“I do not think the simple, functional lines of communist urbanism have ever before been represented in this way, brought out and added to an image as clean and potent as it is nostalgic and alienating. The image sometimes has something of Red Desert (1964) in its representation of iron and concrete as an expressive backdrop, as an external rhyme to the protagonist’s interiority,” wrote Alex Mircioi, F-sides.ro, “Malvina Urșianu între paginile istoriei” (“Malvina Urșianu Amid the Pages of History”).

Indeed, it is a film of the brutalism of the 1980s dictatorship, where humanity became a luxury or a waste—just like a light left burning in a studio flat on the 10th floor of a block, itself empty too.