PĂCALĂ (1974) – comedy film online

Directed by: Geo Saizescu
Script: Dumitru Radu Popescu, Geo Saizescu
Cast: Sebastian Papaiani, Mariella Petrescu, Ștefan Mihăilescu-Brăila, Vasilica Tastaman, Octavian Cotescu, Mariana Mihuț, Aurel Cioranu, Cosma Brașoveanu, Tanți Cocea, Ion Besoiu, Ovid Teodorescu, Ștefan Bănică, Geo Saizescu, Nucu Păunescu, Ileana Stana Ionescu, Dorina Lazăr, Mihai Mereuță, Alexandru Lungu, Dumitru Chesa, Dorel Vișan
Producer: Vasilica Istrate
Cinematography by: Mircea George Cornea
Edited by: Margareta Anescu
Sound: Silviu Camil
Music: Radu Șerban
Year: 1974
Category: Feature film
Genre: Comedy
Duration: 125 minutes

0 – Cinepub viewers

PLOT SUMMARY

A mischievous child, called Păcală, is born in a Romanian Romanian village, in a needy house. Precocious, he knows what the world is like, with its good and bad, its beautiful people as well as its fools and scoundrels. Being his own bear, he conditions his coming into the world and asks his mother, who “can do anything”, not “life without death” like the hero of other fairy tales, but the skill to cheat death whenever it comes her way, so that she has time to punish the stupid and the stupid, the villains, the wicked, the winged, those who break the laws of humanity.

Unborn yet, he knows that the right weapon is laughter, a clever farce, a stinging trick. Mother acquiesces. Brought by the stork, Păcală comes down to earth and comes up against the stupidity and abuses of the rich and the village elders: the tax collector, the judge, the innkeeper, the priest, the huntsman. With his clever mind, his double-tongued words, playing the fool, he finds a needle in everyone’s eye. Tirelessly, he roams the world to stamp out ugliness, stupidity and injustice.

AWARDS:

• 1974 – ACIN – Special Jury Prize for the contribution to the promotion of Romanian film comedy (Dumitru Radu Popescu and Geo Saizescu)

CRITICAL REVIEWS:

“Păcală is a goldfish. His journey begins infinitely and ends infinitely. Like Don Quixote, he sets out into the world to do battle with the windmills, with Stupidity – a thousand-headed dragon. His battle is hard and endless, for his adversary feeds on a miraculous nourishment that multiplies his strength and his face endlessly. The arrogance, cunning, cowardice, naivety, gullibility, gullibility, and arivism are so many heads of the monster that must be slain.” – D.R. Popescu

“Comedy (be it picaresque) requires organization, rigorous calculation of effects, precise shooting. Saizescu’s comedy is a drunken drunkenness, a drunken debauchery, a drunken drunkenness.” – Andrei Gorzo, agenda.liternet.ro

“The movie “Păcala” resembles paintings such as “The Peasant Wedding”, “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent”, “The Peasant Dance” or “The Land of Cockaigne”. Moreover, Bruegel painted in the spirit of tradition, and can be associated with his predecessor Hieronymus Bosch, with what he left us in the fabulous triptych called “The Garden of Earthly Pleasures”. But this popular playful spirit has not been captured by any Romanian painter, but Geo Saizescu did in his film “Păcală”, also a painting of pleasures, because to film is to paint with images. Everyone is the other way around. It’s a general madness, all the characters, about 50 of them, are making fools of themselves, they are involved in a sui-generis mess, a hullabaloo that neither Sorescu, nor Amza Pellea, nor Marin Preda, nor any other cultured writer, concerned with reflecting the specific national, with a Oltenesc panache, have managed to achieve.” – Grid Modorcea, art-emis.ro

“An older project and dream of the filmmaker, the movie “Păcală” is a testimony to Geo Saizescu’s ambition to fuse, within the limits of a cinematic narrative, ballad and anecdote, proverb and joke, folk tale and modern or traditional comedy (…). The simple tone of the narration, the fast and efficient editing, the unrestrained interpretation give an idea of Geo Saizescu’s directorial capacities in the comic register.” – Dan Comșa, Cinema 1974 Magazine

“The emblematic character of our popular humor (evoked as early as 1920 by Aurel Petrescu in his animation and, later, also by him, in 1926 in “Păcală and Tândală in Bucharest”, with Ion Manu and Aurel Athanasescu) is revived in a feature film whose subject “is deliberately left to flow freely, without cinematic blows” (G. Saizescu), that is, by renouncing the rigors of drama, combining proverb and snoava, with ballad and fairy tale.” – Tudor Caranfil

“”Păcală” is reminiscent of Saizescu’s “A Midsummer Day’s Smile” (1964), also by Saizescu: a rural, socialist-realist comedy, set in the post-collectivization process. Both are about a twisted young man (played by Papaiani) who shows up in the village world and upsets the village. “A Midsummer” (about which I have written more here) reflects, through its narrative arc, a jovial image of actuality (utopian or not), while “Păcală”, which does not converge in a unitary direction, is sustained mainly by the joke. And the joke is not enough to round out and fulfill on the screen the myth of the trickster who hijacks by his apparent naivety any danger, who makes fun and messes up the world to make it a better place.” – Emil Vasilache, cinepub.ro

TRIVIA:

• “Păcală” is the second most watched Romanian movie of all times, as it sold 14,644,029 tickets in theaters, only 1,557 less than “Nea Mărin, the Billionaire”, Sergiu Nicolaescu’s feature film. “Păcală” also managed to attract 7,000,000 viewers in a single broadcast on Romanian television in 1976, ranking third that year.
• About the incarnation of the character of Păcală in the protagonist of the movie, the director Geo Saizescu said: “I firmly believe that Papaiani had to be Păcală, without him I would not have made the movie. (…) I conceived a character who was supposed to attract the crowd, to be loved, a bearer of Romanian thoughts and feelings. The fact is that each one of us is Păcală”.
• Dorel Vișan, Dorina Lazăr and Horațiu Mălăele made their cinematic debuts with roles in the movie “Păcală”.
• Filmed in several stages, most of the shooting took place in different picturesque areas of Valcea county – Râmnicu Valcea, Păușești, Govora, Ionești and Balcești. This first series of filming was interrupted after only 20 days due to bad weather. According to the film’s director, “By the fall of ’72, we hadn’t even started filming when it started raining so much that it rained continuously for 42 days…” The film’s production was temporarily halted on November 15, 1972.
• More than 200 actors played in the movie, only in the sequence in which Păcală’s group searches the bottom of the Olt River, about 50-60 of them were used. Along with the actors, the film also features the director Geo Saizescu, who has not been absent from his films since 1972. Many extras from the local area (Vâlcea) were also present at the shoot.
• Because Romania did not have the necessary technical equipment to realize the kind of stunts imagined by the director, the combined filming had to be done abroad. Discussions were held to have the cinematography done in Moscow and Leningrad, but the production team was refused. In the end, the first round of combined filming was carried out in the A.P. Dovzhenko studio in Kiev.
• Sebastian Papaiani played Păcală disguised as a priest with a goat’s beard: “I filmed Păcală disguised as a priest, so he wouldn’t be caught by bandits. Papaiani filmed with a beard borrowed from a… goat. (I shaved off the goat’s beard, put it on Papas’ make-up and, so as not to upset the goat’s master, I glued it back on the real owner (i.e. the goat itself!)”, wrote Saizescu at the end of the first day of filming.
• After initially dreaming of a collaboration with the poet Tudor Arghezi, Saizescu wrote the screenplay with the writer D.R. Popescu.
• The local film-makers’ intention to screen the adventures of Păcală, the legendary comic folk hero, dates back to the Romantic era of cinema. The first project dates back to 1914, when a production company called “Romanian National Film” was set up, financed by the industrialist Bessel, who intended to produce several comedies, including “From the Life of Păcală”, with Pierre d’Allyer as scriptwriter and director. The cast included big names of the time, such as Aurel Athanasescu and Elvira Popescu, but the film never went into production. Subsequently, the first Romanian animated film, lost today, was called “Păcala in the Moon” and premiered on April 4, 1920, at the National Military Circle, directed by Aurel Petrescu.
• Also in the interwar period, Jean Mihail was also tempted to make a movie about Păcală, his intentions being presented in several articles published in the magazine “Rampa”.
• In 1950, Victor Eftimiu also wrote a screenplay, “Păcală și Tândală”, which he sold for 60,000 lei to the Bucharest Film Studio. The film went into production in 1955, under the direction of Gheorghe Turcu, but filming stopped halfway through, after a million lei had already been spent, due to “artistic and ideological mistakes and shortcomings”, despite the fact that both the director and the chief cameraman, Guttman Lupu, were graduates of the Moscow Film Institute. The cast included Ștefan Ciubotărașu, Aurel Cioranu, Eugen Tănase and Ileana Gorea.
• One of the most difficult sequences was the “throwing the fools into the Olt river”. No one actually wanted to throw themselves into the raging river.
• Before it reached the public, the movie had to face the censors of the time. Between November 14 and December 21, 1973, no less than six rounds of screenings were held, each time with numerous changes requested “to raise the artistic quality of the film”.
• The premiere was scheduled for March 11, 1974, at the “Patria” cinema, where the people of Bucharest were in full force. “People wanted to laugh, and Păcală was a good enough argument to create endless queues. There were stampedes, windows were broken. There used to be only two ticket booths in the small hall. They couldn’t cope, people were getting angry, so they put some cracks in the wall facing the “Melody Bar”, so they could improvise two or three more boxes, to calm the citizens down”, recalled stuntman Adrian Ștefănescu, who was a regular in the cast of Geo Saizescu’s movies.
• After three decades (in 2006), the director fulfilled his ambition and made the movie “Păcală is back”, with Denis Ștefan in the leading role.
• In folklore, the pranks of Păcală are gathered in a cycle of snoads, which are the basis for the later works of Petre Dulfu and Iosif Nădejde. Other writers, such as Ion Creangă and Ioan Slavici also wrote about this character. Păcala was also a comic strip hero, a series with him as the protagonist, published since 1968 in the magazine “Luminița”, published by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth Union and later under the aegis of the National Council of the Pioneers Organization.
• Geo Saizescu was born on November 14, 1972 and died on September 23, 2013 in Bucharest.
• The director’s son, Cătălin Saizescu, continued the tradition and also pursued a career in cinema.

LINES:

• “Give me your blessing, mother! Grant me, mother, that I may always be young, that I may never grow old and die when I marry stupidity!” – Păcală (Sebastian Papaiani)
• “He who becomes a sheep, the wolf eats him!” – Păcala (Sebastian Papaiani)
• “What you stole, I gave back!” – Păcala (Sebastian Papaiani)
• “That’s not worth 30 bucks!” – Păcala (Sebastian Papaiani)
• “Today I met your man in the market and he told me to stop by his house, you can believe me, whatever I tell you!” – Păcala (Sebastian Papaiani)
• “Do you have a drop of water? Because I’m so hungry I’ve nowhere to sleep tonight!” – Păcala (Sebastian Papaiani)
• “If you don’t give me the money, I’ll cut you!” – Păcala (Sebastian Papaiani)
• “You had a lot of money and you were going like a fool!” – Păcala (Sebastian Papaiani)
• “Well, we’re home… how many of us are home… we’re home… how many pots we have! (…) How many pots apiece!” – Păcală (Sebastian Papaiani)
• “I’m not playing the fool. I’m happy!” – Păcala (Sebastian Papaiani)
• “I saw a snail pulling a carriage full of milkmen!” – Păcălița (Mariella Petrescu)
• “I am me. Just like you. I came from there to here!” – Păcălița (Mariella Petrescu)

ARTICLES:

• Geo Saizescu, the director who brought us Păcală: “Papaiani filmed with a beard borrowed from a goat” – adevarul.ro
• 50 years since the movie “Păcală”, the prankster who conquered all generations – adevarul.ro
• Meeting with Păcală for a healthy laugh, Sunday on TVR2 – tvr.ro
• Biography and movies of Geo Saizescu, the master of Romanian comedy – mediafax.ro
• Geo Saizescu: “I firmly believe that Papaiani had to be Păcală, without him I wouldn’t have made the movie!” – ziarulmetropolis.ro
• Păcală, the most popular Romanian movie was shot in Vâlcea. Fabulous backstage details – indiscret.ro
• Geo Saizescu, the master of Romanian comedy – uzpr.ro
• National humor – Păcală is back – agenda.liternet.ro
• Director Geo Saizescu died – romania-actualitati.ro
• Geo Saizescu has died. Irina Margareta Nistor: “He was an extremely cinematic presence in himself” – stirileprotv.ro
• Geo Saizescu and Sebastian Papaiani present Romanian film at Espacio Niram in Madrid – hotnews.ro
• „Păcală este simbolul românului neaoș, iubitor de viață” – evz.ro
• „Cred cu tărie că Papaiani trebuia să fie Păcală, fără el nu aș fi făcut filmul!” – prwave.ro
• Cine a fost Geo Saizescu, maestrul filmului de comedie românesc – dcnews.ro
• Sebastian Papaiani, într-un Păcală suprarealist – art-emis.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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