ALONE VS MYSELF (2003) – drama film online

Directed by: Andrei Blaier
Script by: Petre Sălcudeanu
Cast: Gheorghe Dinică, Florian Ghimpu, Dana Rogoz, Irina Movilă, Costel Constantin, Florin Zamfirescu, Mitică Popescu
Producer: Andrei Boncea
Cinematography by: Alexandru Solomon
Edited by: Mihai Mitici
Sound: Andrei Chiroșca
Music: Dan Ștefănică
Year: 2003
Category: Feature film
Genre: Drama
Duration: 107 minutes

PLOT SUMMARY

A notorious convict, Paraschiv, known as Lamă (Gheorghe Dinică), an undercover agent during the communist regime, agrees to return to prison to kill the young “Literă” (Florian Ghimpu), an inconvenient witness against some influential figures. But an unexpected bond forms between the two, and Lamă ends up questioning his mission.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Andrei Blaier:

“I can say that I am satisfied with what we have achieved. I had a young team by my side, who learned very quickly what they needed to do. (…) people of the future, on whose shoulders Romanian cinema will rest. (…) The actors I worked with know that I love them. And I knew from the start, without a doubt, that they would be very cooperative.”

“The actors may be the same, but the roles are never the same. I never offer an actor a role he’s played before. To win him over — to get my hands on a devil like Gheorghe Dinică, whom I love to death and hope he loves me back — I’ve always offered him another chance, another role. If you want to work with an actor and win him over just by offering him a pittance, you tell him: . You can’t win Dinică over that way. He is so honest with his profession and with himself that if you don’t offer Dinică a role that truly interests him, he will never accept it. He’s too good a friend of mine for me not to know him, and I’m sure he’s just as I say. (…) His misfortune is that he was born in Romania. If he’d been making films abroad, Dinică would have been every bit as good as De Niro or Al Pacino.”

CRITICAL REVIEWS:

“Andrei Blaier picks up the thread of the gangster film genre that he (alongside Mircea Mureșan: ‘Miss Litoral’ and ‘The Second Fall of Constantinople’) pioneered in Romanian cinema during the first half of the 1990s.” – Valerian Sava, observatorcultural.ro

“Cynicism is another abundant and visible raw material in all the characters, with the initial exception of the angelic ones (who will eventually fall in line): a cynicism etched into every grimace, glance, gesture, or line, whether masculine or feminine, as the sole ingredient that drives any form of humor out of the equation, one might say that from it — from this flat, opaque cynicism — our authorial mafiosi draw all their creative sap, knowingly.” – Valerian Sava, observatorcultural.ro

“Moving back and forth through Literă’s memories, with flashbacks and elaborate scene reconstructions, the film seems driven by a voracious need to touch upon all the subjects banned by party censorship, feasting with both hands on the ‘delights’ of authorial freedom — manele music, sex, secret police conspiracies, promiscuity, and the flaunting of wealth. In this frantic slalom, not only are the details and subtext lost, but also the structural elements of authenticity. The characters are barely sketched, distorted into caricatures, maintaining mechanical relationships, merely going through the motions and delivering the lines from the script, as if in a hurry to move on to the next scene. They are just fanciful vapors in a sauna on the ground floor of an apartment building.” – Augustin Cupșa, cinepub.ro

“Perhaps this is, in fact, the impression of the bleak 2000s — the era of the definitive establishment of kitsch and post-communist social climbing in Romania. After the fall of oppressive totalitarian structures, the common man, as described by Hannah Arendt in ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, found themselves naked and starving in the midst of a tax and legislative paradise, devoid of morals and education, climbing to the pinnacle of power and imposing their tribe as a new dynasty that would endure and consolidate itself right up to the present day. Unfortunately, “Alone Versus Myself” fails to amount to a harsh critique or even a faithful reflection of reality. Lacking the necessary means, the film does not construct an aesthetic of either ‘evil’ or ‘ugliness,’ but becomes merely an insignificant part of them.” – Augustin Cupșa, cinepub.ro

TRIVIA:

• Actress Eugenia Șerban makes her film debut in the role of TV presenter Mari.
• Filming took two and a half months. (Robert Stan, curentul.info)
• The film was seen by 4,779 viewers in Romanian theaters, according to a report on the number of viewers for Romanian films from the premiere date through December 31, 2014, compiled by the National Center for Cinematography.
• Andrei Blaier considered Gheorghe Dinică an irreplaceable actor. He would have cast him in four different roles in the film that was never made, “Zahei the Blind”.
• “Alone Versus Myself” is the director’s final film.
• Andrei Blaier graduated from the “I.L. Caragiale” Institute of Theater and Cinematographic Arts in 1956, in the same class as Serbian director Siniša Ivetici, with whom he made his first films.
• His early works are characterized by a search for artistic identity and a relative distancing from the ideological constraints of the era.
• He is the director of films considered major milestones in Romanian cinema, such as Mornings of a Sensible Youth (1966), Postcards with Wild Flowers (1975), and Through the Ashes of the Empire (1976).
• He co-directed the TV series Lights and Shadows (1979–1982), an ambitious project about World War II, which was halted by communist censorship before its completion.
• He died on December 11, 2011, in Bucharest.

LINES:

 • “Why don’t you give them more bromide? They were about to jump on me.” – Mari (Eugenia Șerban)
• “If something scares me, it’s clear I’ve fallen in love.” – Ioana (Dana Rogoz)
• “Bullets are flying from the TV. Right here.” — Literă (Florian Ghimpu)
• “Hey, kid, your life is hanging by a thread.” — Lamă (Gheorghe Dinică)
• “If you were just some small-time crook, would I be wasting my time with you?” — Lamă (Gheorghe Dinică)
• “They’ve ruined you! (…) and you’re no good with women!” — Ioana (Dana Rogoz)
• “Hey, you idiots, shut your mouths, or I’ll smash your skulls.” – Mangiurea (Florin Zamfirescu)
• “Big deals in the legal world are made in the court hallways, not in the private rooms of 5-star restaurants.” – Leo (Irina Movilă)
• “So far, I’ve been to about eight prisons.” – Literă (Florian Ghimpu)
• “You’re the only one I love.” – Ioana (Dana Rogoz)
• “Shamil, my husband. (…) He has a palace in Dubai.” – Ioana (Dana Rogoz)
• “Too much ice in the glass. It’s like drinking tea.” – Leo (Irina Movilă)
• “The sergeant with a general’s salary who gave you all those orders is in your cell with you.” – Corcolan (Costel Constantin)

ARTICLES:

• Alone Versus Myself, a MediaPro Pictures production – studiourilebuftea.ro
• Alone Versus Myself – istoriafilmului.ro
• Review: “Alone Versus Myself” by Valerian Sava – observatorcultural.ro
• Review: “Filming has wrapped on the feature film “Alone Versus Myself”, by Robert Stan – curentul.info.ro
• Andrei Blaier: Sparks and Flames 1. – istoriafilmului.ro
• How the Romanian secret police recruited director Andrei Blaier to expose “hostile elements” in Buftea Studios – adevarul.ro

This premiere is part of a national archive project supported by the Romanian National Film Centre.
Special thanks goes to the Romanian Filmmakers Union and to the Romanian Film Archive.

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