by Bogdan Jitea

Before becoming the most important Romanian screenwriter of the communist era, Titus Popovici was a promising prose writer, making his debut at just twenty-five with the novel Străinul (The Stranger, 1955), followed three years later by Setea (The Thirst, 1958). Both are set chronologically in the turbulent period of the mid-1940s that marks the collapse of the old regime and the gradual yet rapid installation of the communists in power in postwar Romania. Before long, the two novels were adapted for the screen: Setea in 1961 by the director Mircea Drăgan, and Străinul three years later by Mihai Iacob.

Unlike the first film, which has as its social context the Transylvanian village world thrown into turmoil by the effects of the agrarian reform initiated by the communists, Străinul is set in an urban frame—an unspecified city, yet easily recognizable as the Arad in which the writer was born and spent his childhood. The viewer is quickly ushered into the atmosphere typical of a high school of long standing, with a strict hierarchy and discipline. Popovici is a screenwriter attentive to nuance, managing to make efficient use of narrative devices to capture the characteristics of an entire era, such as the episode in which a Jewish pupil is bullied by several classmates. Although we are dealing with a slight anachronism—since by 1944 the education system no longer operated under even the restrictive numerus clausus, which had allowed an extremely small percentage of Jews to attend Romanian schools, having moved instead to the numerus nullus that imposed a total ban—the sequence serves to establish the antisemitic climate of the old regime.

The suffocating ambient conformism is opposed by the young Andrei Sabin (Ștefan Iordache), one of the first antiheroes of Romanian cinema, a rebellious high-schooler who plays cards, frequents disreputable establishments, and defies the school authorities, but who also leaps to the defense of the Jewish boy attacked by his classmates. Despite his proletarian social extraction—the son of a railwayman—Andrei is a brilliant pupil, and between him and Lucian Varga (Șerban Cantacuzino), who comes from an illustrious family in the city, a genuine friendship takes shape. His political maturation comes about gradually, as he witnesses the hypocrisy and inequity of the old regime’s upper class. The decisive moment of his passage to a revolutionary consciousness occurs when he delivers a speech against Romania’s participation in the war, which brings about his expulsion and his investigation by the Siguranța, the old regime’s security police. Antisemitism intertwines with anti-communism, and Andrei is accused by the school’s leadership of “Yid ideas.” This is the prejudice dominant in the right-wing milieus of the old regime, which regarded communism as an ideology of the Jews—an attitude reflected for the first time in communist cinema.

The relaxation of the regime that came about in the early 1960s, against the backdrop of the distancing from Moscow and the resumption of contacts with the West, allowed the screenwriter to broach, with fewer reservations, certain aspects previously occluded by communist propaganda. For instance, on several occasions the exponents of the Varga clan give voice to the Russophobia prevalent in interwar political circles. In the course of a drawing-room conversation there is a line containing a subtle allusion to the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, by which the Nazis and the Soviets had partitioned Eastern Europe: “It is all because of Hitler. He opened the way for the Russians into Europe.” Indeed, despite the Allied bombardments and the alliance with Nazi Germany, the sentiments of high society remain Anglo-American throughout. To the great satisfaction of Lucian’s grandfather, the Peasant Party senator Varga (George Calboreanu), his grandson is learning English, and at the receptions they give people amuse themselves to modern American music, such as the jazz of Louis Armstrong. The exponents of the grande bourgeoisie await the Anglo-American allies not necessarily to free them from Hitler’s boot, but rather to forestall the imminent arrival of the Russians.

The oligarchy’s duplicity is revealed in the help Andrei receives from Senator Varga, who intervenes to extricate him from the hands of the Siguranța and to find him a job at the Arad Railway-Carriage Works (UVA). The influential Peasant Party man’s generosity is politically motivated, as he seeks to make friends among the communists, anticipating their rise in the wake of the Soviet military success. Andrei’s integration into the ranks of the communist workers proves laborious, given that the latter are, at that moment, involved in actions to sabotage the German war machine. His ties to the Varga clan lead the communist activists at UVA to suspect their new colleague of being a Siguranța agent, so the young man is obliged to earn their trust, passing through a veritable ritual of initiation into the secrets of the clandestine communist movement.

The film’s second part centers on the act of 23 August 1944. Now a mysterious character enters the scene as well—one everyone in the first part avoids speaking about. Andrei’s uncle, Gheorghe Jurcă (Gheorghe Dinică), of whom we know only that he was in prison for an unspecified offense, turns out to be a communist militant. A member of the party leadership, Jurcă had been arrested for his political activity and escapes around the time of the anti-Hitlerite coup. For the Romanian viewer contemporary with the film’s making, the parallel with the political biography of the communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej—at that moment at the head of the regime—was entirely transparent. Antonescu’s overthrow is received with enthusiasm by the population, who gather in the city’s central square. Before them, Jurcă delivers a speech against the prefect, accusing him of parleying with the fascists. In this way the idea is suggested that the representatives of the old regime were playing a double game, unlike the intransigent communists who oppose any compromise. “In these years humankind has learned, at the cost of so many sacrifices, that there is only one way to deal with the fascists. By disarming them!”

In presenting the unfolding of the events of 23 August 1944, Titus Popovici strictly observes the official narrative and overstates the role played by the communists, with the party at the head of the revolutionary workers who take control of the city’s factories. The army immediately places itself at the disposal of Jurcă and his communists for the defense of strategic objectives and for the disarming of the German military garrison. Yet where the communists themselves are concerned, the screenwriter offers an unvarnished image, which once again contrasts with the manner in which they had appeared in cinema until then. Led by Andrei, they break up a meeting of the Peasant Party youth. Unlike the foppish young gentlemen from the city’s good families who make up the future of Maniu’s party, Andrei’s communists are rather villainous-looking figures, recruited from among the young men who do not attend school. It is a tacit acknowledgment of the party’s origin in the margins of society. For this reason, Jurcă encourages his new disciple Andrei to return to high school, since the future regime will need the doctors, teachers, and engineers of tomorrow. He gives him a lesson in political pragmatism, rejecting his revolutionary ardor: “The spirit of adventure must be overcome, because there is a great deal to be done in this country.” Although unpolished compared with their adversaries, the communists have, however, the advantage of devotion to the party and of the sincerity of their political convictions. Faced with the choice between his upper-class sweetheart Sonia Mureșan (Irina Petrescu) and the communist cause, Andrei chooses the latter. In contrast to his friend’s political idealism, Lucian Varga is aware of the hollowness of the values and principles of the Peasant Party, within whose ranks he is preparing to make his start. He mocks his father, the Peasant Party lawyer Salvator Varga, unmasking the empty words of the party’s rhetorical arsenal: “Romanianism, democracy—drop it.” With his remarkable propagandistic skill, Titus Popovici inverts the roles played by the two parties in the years immediately following the act of 23 August 1944. Unlike the historical reality, in the film it is the Peasant Party members who act with violence in the public space and who conspire to eliminate their political adversaries physically, while the communists demonstrate peacefully, demanding free elections and a democratic government. For instance, Andrei Sabin is savagely beaten by Peasant Party activists in the middle of the street, and Salvator Varga, sensing that his world is about to end, drives his luxurious car into the crowd of communist demonstrators.

The film benefits from a meticulous set design, with interiors but also exteriors that truthfully reconstruct the era of the old regime, such as the street advertisements and the private shops with their signs on display that appear in the long tracking shot of Andrei and Lucian’s walk through the streets of historic Arad. The nuanced way in which the characters are constructed, and their evolutions as these interfere with one another over the course of the film, set Străinul apart from the rest of the communist propaganda output, with its gallery of heroes cast in schematic, Manichaean molds. The second-plane characters in particular receive attention from the screenwriter, as is the case, for example, with the Greek Catholic priest Potra (Fory Etterle), a Latin teacher who draws close to the young Andrei Sabin and becomes a sort of confessor to him. While at first Potra seems an enlightened and tolerant spirit, animated by altruistic intentions toward his protégé, toward the end his reactionary side is revealed, and the cleric proves to be nothing other than an instrument at the disposal of the bourgeois-landowning class, abandoning any moral scruple whatsoever: “From now on, against such people [communists—author’s note], not the word, but the weapon!”

Străinul is at once a film about the young Andrei Sabin’s exit from childhood and his acquisition of a political consciousness, a film about the maturing and the outgrowing of the revolutionary impulses of the Romanian communist movement, and a social fresco depicting the collapse of the old regime and the throes of the birth of a new one. By inserting the protagonist’s individual destiny into the great collective history, Titus Popovici furnished communist propaganda with the key of the human dimension for decoding, for the wider public, the significance of the moment of 23 August 1944 as the birth certificate of the new regime.