by Augustin Cupșa

Adapted from Liviu Rebreanu’s eponymous 1927 novel, Sergiu Nicolaescu’s Ciuleandra brings back into discussion a controversial subject that takes on new meanings in every social era: uxoricide. A complex and sophisticated personality, Liviu Rebreanu is one of the few writers to have reinvented himself with each book: Ion and Răscoala (The Uprising), Pădurea spânzuraților (The Forest of the Hanged), Adam și Eva (Adam and Eve), and every short story—from Ițic Ștrul, dezertor (Ițic Ștrul, Deserter) to the present one—take on different styles and themes, yet never lose the signature of a singular author, obsessively preoccupied with human nature and psychological vulnerabilities.

At the stage of writing the novella Ciuleandra, Liviu Rebreanu was abreast of naturalist theory and had already succeeded, with great success, in drawing the portrait of the moral guilt that ultimately leads to suicide as an implacable fate, in The Forest of the Hanged. In Ciuleandra, however, published five years later, one sees how psychoanalytic mechanisms are also at work within the epic body—a theory, at the time, still at the dawn of its course. The book’s subject has been debated intensely and at length, not only by literary critics but also by psychologists and psychiatrists, the latter finding in Puiu Faranga the author of a crime that is hard to decipher. In the penumbra of the psychological conflict and its ingenious articulation, the writer carefully weaves the social plane: the silent confrontation between the poor but vigorous peasantry and the cruel, degenerate boyar class, which can find its salvation only at the expense of those who have remained close to the land.

The novel had previously been adapted in 1930 by Martin Berger, under the title Verklungene Träume, the first Romanian-German co-production, with an insistence on the psychological dimension. In the 1985 reworking, again a Romanian-German co-production, Sergiu Nicolaescu pays particular attention—visual and poetic—to the social conflict, to class difference, and to the rift between two worlds: the rural and traditional versus the urban and Westernized. Seeking the dramatic essence of these evident ruptures of the early twentieth century, the director brings to the foreground the bloody suppression of the 1907 uprising, an event given less prominent relief in the book. More than that, he attempts to place it in a causal link with the development of a morbid personality: as a child, Puiu Faranga witnesses the execution of the uprising’s leaders, an event that will profoundly shake his soul and be deeply imprinted in his memory, acting upon him from the subconscious and surfacing, in nightmares, only after the moral crisis has become manifest.

Although programmatically Sergiu Nicolaescu’s intervention seems to fall in line with the political doctrine of the time, it draws along with it—perhaps without his realizing—a shift in the causality of the psychic disorder. In Liviu Rebreanu, the paradigm is rather naturalistic: the “thinned blood” and the youthful sins of the father, Policarp Faranga, become structural vices in the son’s personality. Sergiu Nicolaescu, by contrast, leans rather toward a behaviorist variant, through which he unintentionally exonerates the young Faranga—the execution the child witnessed could be the hidden cause of the drama, a kind of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It is likely, however, that the choice of interpretive direction was dictated by artistic conception as well, and not by politics alone. In literature, the epic space allows Liviu Rebreanu to play on the allusion of a curse, of the occult force of the earth and of the peasants who methodically destroy the oppressive aristocracy: with its obsessive rhythm, the Ciuleandra insinuates itself into the souls of the boyars, powerless before its magical force, and devours them, at the boundary between folk music and incantation. In the film, the director needs a visually striking causality, one of real rather than narrative facts—a poetics of blood, mud, sweat, and young women whirling in the hora.

These are two paths that are not mutually exclusive. Both set out from the state of fact, the reality of a murder in a prominent Bucharest family in 1925: one late-summer evening, Puiu Faranga (Ion Rițiu) strangles his wife, Mădălina (Anca Szönyi Thomas), seemingly for no reason at all. The boy’s father is Policarp Faranga (Gheorghe Cozorici), a feared and well-off lawyer at the head of the Justice system, a widower of long standing. In the film the biographical aspect is passed over, but in the novella the death of Puiu’s mother—a distinguished Olga Dobrescu—is set at his age of four, a profoundly dramatic event in a child’s life.

The all-powerful Policarp Faranga attempts to cover over the gravity of the crime, going for the version of a fit of lost lucidity, which could spare the boy of intent. The Prefect of Bucharest, the Chief of Police, and his guard appear at the scene at once, and are exceedingly indulgent toward the Faranga family—servile, even, with a submissiveness that has become automatic rather than performed, through long practice before the one at the top of the social hierarchy. Obviously, the solution—which Puiu refuses from start to finish—is to have insanity declared following an admission to the psychiatric hospital. Here fate sets itself against Policarp Faranga’s plan through an unforeseen detail: Professor Chirilescu, whom the former Minister of Justice knew well enough to manoeuvre to his advantage, is away on holiday on the Côte d’Azur. As a result, Puiu Faranga ends up in the custody of a young and frowning psychiatrist, severe and obsessive over every detail, Dumitru Aioanei (Ștefan Iordache). As it happens, the doctor had known Mădălina and loved her openly, being from the same village as her. The girl, only seventeen, loved him too, and the two were already dreaming of their wedding. Except that, on a clear summer’s day, in the village of Vărzari in Argeș, the landowner Policarp makes his appearance with his son, who is driving an English car. Unexpectedly, the beautiful Mădălina is chosen not by Puiu but by his father, who sees in her the chance to revive the family’s blood; she is bought from her family and transformed by the elder Faranga, through a Pygmalion-type process, into Madelene, a proud peasant girl disguised as a Bucharest salon lady.

Through this undertaking the persistent lawyer Faranga dislodges an entire world—traditional, deeply spiritual, Romanian—and carries it by force through the imposing but cold halls of the European museums of Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and London. Intuitively, Mădălina ought to have been even more deeply affected by the scene of the execution of the uprising’s leaders, because among them was her own father. It was then that the gazes of the two future husband and wife crossed, though they remained anonymous to one another: Puiu was in his father’s chauffeured car, while the little girl, only five years old, stood in the front row of the villagers, encircled by her mother’s arms. Admittedly, not everyone present at so atrocious an event develops post-traumatic stress disorder, but it is unlikely that, given her relation to the victim, the girl was not profoundly marked.

And yet, through his final gesture, which puts an end to an extremely expressive turmoil, Puiu Faranga seems just as entitled to be considered a victim in his turn. If we look closely, we identify nowhere, at their first meeting at the manor in Mănești, a genuine physical attraction between him and the beautiful Mădălina. True, the young man’s attention is captured by her radiant face and luminous eyes, but he asks her to dance the Ciuleandra—maddened by the rhythm and vitality of the music—more than he asks to be allowed to come near her. He even, in private, opposes his father’s downright scandalous idea of taking the girl out of the village. We may speculate further that, in fact, the memory of the execution of the peasants who had danced the Ciuleandra before being shot is the unconscious motor of his pull toward Mădălina. The two events are glued together through the melody of the Ciuleandra (the epiphenomenon), and the affective charge (the phenomenon) is transferred from one to the other. In this way, the love and admiration he bears the immaculate woman come to be contaminated by the shadows of a bloody crime. The man will remain permanently ambivalent toward the woman—attraction and murderous drive. The hypothesis would accord with Melanie Klein’s theory of envy—the expression of destructive (oral-sadistic) impulses. During the psychiatric investigation, Puiu admits that he was jealous, but not of someone—rather of something. This distinction places him more squarely in the category of “envy,” for, as Melanie Klein states, jealousy is grounded in envy but presupposes a relationship between two persons. Yet, before committing the crime and reaching the psychiatrist, Puiu knew nothing of any earlier relationship of the girl’s; he only assumed there was a reason why Mădălina was forever distracted, in a world all her own. If we follow the reasoning this far, we must, however, recall that it was not Puiu who took her by force—she was imposed on him by his father; and so a frail boy, who never went against his father’s word, found himself in a predicament: he is shut into a marriage with a woman who does not want him. His instinct told him from the very start that this girl and her world were not for him, so he did not advance things—yet he ended up in a situation of rejection through the will of another, greater and more powerful. Further still, we might consider that the murderous fury against the father was repressed and redirected against the apparent cause of his unhappiness.

Sergiu Nicolaescu’s film takes no account of the psychological incursion and forces the biographical data and the situations so that the politically convenient social thesis stands out as plainly as possible—stridently, even. Without major aesthetic achievements (though the sets and costumes are impeccable, achieving a true period piece) and without resolving the mystery of the murder, the film is nonetheless worth recommending, because the subject of Ciuleandra never ceases to fascinate—it is like a kaleidoscope tube, in which the pieces form new geometries at each glance.