SUNDAY AT SIX (1966) – drama film online

Directed by: Lucian Pintilie
Script: Ion Mihăileanu and Lucian Pintilie
Cast: Irina Petrescu, Dan Nuțu, Graziela Albini, Eugenia Popovici, Dorina-Nila Bentamar, Eugenia Bosînceanu, Marcel Gingulescu, Costel Constantinescu, Constantin Cojocaru, Lidia Gabor, Șerban Holban
Producer: Bucharest Film Studio
Cinematography by: Sergiu Huzum
Edited by: Eugenia Nagy
Sound: Andrei Papp
Music: Radu Căplescu
Year: 1966
Category: Feature film
Genre: Drama
Duration: 78 minutes

3 – Cinepub viewers

PLOT SUMMARY

Romania, 1940. A boy meets a girl. They fall in love without knowing each other’s true identity. They both secretly fight fascism, leading exciting but dangerous lives. Personal beliefs will have a big effect on the course of their troubled love affair. Reality is against them… Two parallel lines that meet for a second only to diverge again, forever.

AWARDS:

• 1966 – Mamaia – Special Jury Prize and Female Performance Award (Irina Petrescu)
• 1966 – Mar del Plata – Special Jury Prize; “Opera Prima” Award; Experiment and Cineclub Movement Award; Special Critics’ Award; Award for Best Actress (Irina Petrescu)
• 1966 – Prague, UNIATEC Congress – Special Jury Prize for lighting interiors with mercury vapor lamps, used for the first time in the world
• 1966 – Acapulco – “Cabeza de Palengua” Golden Trophy
• 1967 – Cannes – Grand Prize in the “Recontres Internationales du film pour Jeunesse” section
• 1968 – Adelaide – Diploma for best national selection
• 1968 – Hyères – Special Mention at the “Jeune cinéma d’Hyères” Festival

CRITICAL REVIEWS:

“«Sunday at 6» had all the ingredients of a… a command movie: the story of the struggle of the illegalists against the capitalist regime in the 1930s – with “good” communists and “bad” security men. Confident in his politically-correct material, Pintilie cheekily hijacks the message the authorities want to send through a very clever maneuver: he takes inspiration for the formal part of his film from the films of the French New Wave.” (…) He had this brilliant idea, which sheltered him from suspicion: he told the story of the outlaws of the 1930s in the Nouvelle Vague style. It was as if he had delivered to the Party the party booklet wrapped in thin, capitalist paper.” – Alex. Leo Șerban, agenda.liternet.ro

“An extreme case of a gap between substance and form, «Sunday at 6» awakens formal déjà-vu in the memory of any moviegoer who is up to date with the cinema of the era: The elevator going up & down at certain moments of the story, like a visual leitmotif, is a direct borrowing from «Hiroshima mon amour»; the finale on the seashore, in which the young man pursued by the Security is cornered by its agents as in a hopeless huis-clos, is a clear reference to the ending of «Les 400 coups»…” – Alex. Leo Șerban, agenda.liternet.ro

“The reactions captured live, the conception of the soundtrack, the faces of the main and non-professional interpreters, the incongruity between image and sound, the idea of retrospection and, finally, the fully assumed refusal to tell a story in a cursive way, impress.” – Marian Rădulescu, agenda.liternet.ro

“«Sunday at 6 o’clock», a stylistically connected movie to the new Italian and French cinema.” – Cristi Luca, Dilema Veche

“The characters’ existences are consumed in a natural, everyday way, the narration – simple, convincing – unusually processes neorealist experiences.” – Marian Rădulescu, agenda.liternet.ro

“The movie is something more than a tragic love story. It is not at all wrong to say that the story insinuatingly proposes a game of trauma and guilt. Before he can put it into words, Lucian Pintilie resorts to a series of visual metaphors and rhetorical devices that suggest descending into the underworld of trauma hidden in the depths of consciousness – labyrinthine corridors, iron doors with manholes covered with perforated sheet metal like a sieve, through which light flickers from afar, images of people taking on an eerie air, obsessively repeating themselves, the steel cable on the pulleys in the elevator car, showing how this commemorative mechanism is set in motion by an occult force.” – Augustin Cupșa, cinepub.ro

“Trauma is a detachment from oneself, a fracture in one’s own identity – writes Gabor Maté in one of his bestsellers. In Lucian Pintilie’s poetics, it is the struggle between two territories – that of the darkness that holds the soul captive and that of life on the surface, luminous but empty of emotional meaning.” – Augustin Cupșa, cinepub.ro

“At the end, more than at the beginning, the facts are clear and the unequivocal gestures serve a conclusion with strong emotional effect and psychological meaning.” – Augustin Cupșa, cinepub.ro

TRIVIA:

• “Sunday at 6” is Lucian Pintilie’s feature film debut.
• Confrontations with critics and audiences in Romania, with “our exalted” and “our retrograde”, then with the jury, the public and the avant-garde movement in Argentina, convinced Lucian Pintilie to develop “with a stubbornness you cannot suspect” what is good and valuable in Sunday at 6.
• His future works made in Romania until 1990 (the neorealist “The Reenacment” and the grotesque “Why are the bells tolling, Mitică?”) were to suppress what is “stupid, formal, caddish, epigonic” in his debut film, but their release was problematic. After several weeks of screenings that filled packed theaters, “The Reenactment” was arbitrarily banned, and the screen version of I.L. Caragiale’s play was not shown to the public until 1990. (Marian Rădulescu, agenda.liternet.ro)

LINES:

“You must forget, try to forget. You must remember only this: that your name is Ion Arghir.” – Maria (Graziela Albini)
“I know I will forget. I’m very afraid I’ll forget.” – Radu (Dan Nuțu)
“A simple thing. On Sunday at 6 o’clock, in Spring Street, at number 8, you meet a girl.” – Maria (Graziela Albini)
“You have a very good uppercut.” – Anca (Irina Petrescu)
“My father sings. We make a living out of it; and still pretty badly.” – Anca (Irina Petrescu)
“Of course you can still see her. Except that you’re not just any young man.” – Maria (Graziela Albini)
“I’d like to see the sea with you.” – Anca (Irina Petrescu)
“You’re a real bride. And you’re my bride!” – Radu (Dan Nuțu)
“She was the girl I was supposed to date.” – Radu (Dan Nuțu)
“I can’t leave now. I wouldn’t be able to look her in the eyes when I come back.” – Radu (Dan Nuțu)
“Anca will keep her mouth shut!” – Radu (Dan Nuțu)
“What did they do to you? Did they beat you?” – Anca’s mother (Eugenia Popovici)
“I kept quiet. I didn’t speak.” – Anca (Irina Petrescu)
“Anca, the comrades will trust you because you kept quiet.” – Radu (Dan Nuțu)
“I love you very much, Anca.” – Radu (Dan Nuțu)
“You can’t go back home. You’ll be arrested immediately.” – Maria (Graziela Albini)
“There’s something a thousand times worse than fear. Sitting by the window waiting. Being very cold in the room. The waiting, I don’t know why, is linked to the cold.” – Anca (Irina Petrescu)

ARTICLES:

• A solitary purity, Sunday at 6 – agenda.liternet.ro
• Sunday at 6 – istoriafilmuluiromanesc.ro
• Sunday at 6 – filme-carti.ro
• Lucian Pintilie, a director of a piece – agenda.liternet.ro
• Lucian Pintilie, the director of genius, driven out of the country by (and after) “The Revizer” – comentator.ro
• Lucian Pintilie – istoriafilmuluiromanesc.ro

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