by Augustin Cupșa

Dan Chișu’s 2013 film Déjà vu is a surprise and a bet paid off, in more ways than one. Surprising, first, because it looks rather like an experimental film—just 72 minutes long—in which the director steps away from the ambitious projects that set out to map the contemporary (București NonStop, 2015) or Romania’s recent history (Aniversarea, 2017), and concentrates on a single morning in the life of an illegitimate couple, ending up saying more than when the aims are ambitious. Surprising, a second time, through its narrative structure, its twist in the plot, and its cinematic manner. And, not least, through the psychological substratum the story brings to light as an added value.

Preamble

The idea for the film seems inspired by Ridley Scott’s project, in which he and Kevin Macdonald called on the public to send them videos filmed on their phones during a single day: 24 July 2010. They received nearly 80,000 short clips and 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries, out of which Ridley and Tony Scott made Life in a Day, produced and distributed by YouTube in 2011. We do not know exactly what this project was after—to make a documentary of a world the director was never once present for on location? To celebrate the sense of universality and apparent inclusion among people who have nothing to do with one another? To show that film as an art is a mayfly? Or to prop up the YouTube platform and the mobile-phone industry? We recall that, not long ago, the famous British director made the short film Behold (2023) with a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, as part of a campaign promoting the graphic qualities of the Android platform. In any case, it seems Dan Chișu managed to extract exactly what was needed from this endeavour—which he cites explicitly in the film, for that matter—namely the ingenuity and spontaneity of a fragile closeness between a man and a woman, with all the impossibilities of the social contract and of personal psychological vulnerabilities.

The Story

The filming does not proceed as in Ridley Scott’s project, with a mobile phone, but with a camera mounted—like a miner’s lamp—on the male protagonist’s forehead. And that is exactly how the story begins: in a long tunnel of darkness in which Mihai (Dan Chișu), fondly called Miki by the women around him, wakes and gropes for the day’s markers. This confusion is not accidental. The man wakes in his own bed, in his own house—theoretically everything is familiar to him, except the young and attractive woman in the kitchen who has made his coffee in an Turkish coffee pot because she does not know where the espresso machine is. This confusion is due to the fact that Tania (Ioana Flora) is the mistress, not the wife. Their affair has already been going on for nearly three years, but it is the first time the two share the marital bed, whose sheets still carry the wife’s perfume. Former wife or current wife? Each character has their own version of this, and the levels of knowledge among the protagonists are not equal—which is very good for the way events unfold. We do understand, nonetheless, that the man is a successful businessman at a turning point. In fact, this morning is not like any other: Mihai has decided to confront his wife, Valeria Radu (Mirela Oprișor), and bring the situation up to date, to rid himself of the guilt weighing on him and to live happily beside Tania. She, for her part, rightly suspects that the decision has not truly been made in his soul, that Mihai does not have the strength to break with the past and, above all, does not have the courage to face his wife, a successful and very well-known woman. And the best proof is that the man—otherwise so sure of his every gesture and action—insistently asks her to accompany him to the meeting.

And feminine instinct, once again, does not fail. What Tania cannot see, but what is offered to the viewer, from a subjective angle, are the images unfolding in Mihai’s mind. They are intrusive images, yet not out of keeping with his unconscious desires, which overlap with the situation in reality at certain key moments: memories of Valeria—not from just anywhere, but from the very setting in which Tania now speaks and moves—in the kitchen, in the hallway, in the bathroom, in the car. They are the remnants of a fifteen-year marriage. Whereas the present is a clear summer’s day, the scenes from the past unfold in winter, in the snow, which heightens the contrast between the two women and sharply sets off the present plane from the past one. Dan Chișu labels them déjà-vus, although, technically, these actes manqués refer to a subjective impression and not to the playing-out of visual memories. And yet the author is not at all far from the truth: what is at play here, in psychoanalytic terms, is the repressed character of desire. Let us follow the thread.

The Mistress

Even before she sees Valeria, the viewer realizes that Tania is very different from her: she is younger, more candid, more unsure, and, probably, more sensual. By role and by age, the mistress is associated with freshness and change, whereas the wife inspires rather maturity and control. In the opening scene we learn, though we do not see it, that Tania woke early and came down naked to the kitchen to make the coffee. (And she found she was being spied on, through the glass walls giving onto the yard, by Mihai’s mother, who lives next door, so she quickly got dressed again.) It is only the beginning of a long string of mismatches showing that Mihai’s world is run through by a cleavage-fault that keeps deepening. On closer inspection, however, we shall find that Tania has quite a few things in common with Valeria. Not the fact that she finds herself in the same setting as the wife, that she sleeps in her sheets, dries herself with her towel, or ends up in the passenger seat, just like Valeria so many times, on the way to Izvorani, where the family’s holiday house is, but rather something in her nature.

Seemingly childish and unsure of herself, Tania often manages to turn the game in her favour; she knows how to take the reins of the discussion, to demand explanations, to stand up to Mihai and, above all, to fight for her rights, just like a legitimate partner. But there is something more in her behaviour that painfully reminds the man of the atmosphere with his ex: the feminine game of cajoling, emotional blackmail, and teasing that leads into a tender tussle. Well, it is precisely in these moments that the memories of Valeria are triggered in Mihai’s mind. It is, better said, the visual expression of an impression of familiarity.

The Wife

When he discusses déjà vu in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud cites the example of a woman who had the impression she had already been in the house and garden of the friends she was visiting. But it was not the places that lay hidden in her memory, rather another detail, a repressed reverie, as the psychoanalyst demonstrates to us. In that house there was a sick child, just as her little brother had been some time before, when the woman had nursed the guilty wish that he might die and she remain the only child, so as to enjoy all her parents’ love.

In a symbolic way, Mihai too wishes for Valeria’s death; he wishes to remove her from his life, and it is precisely the guilt that lends the thought enough force to resurface. He too is jealous of Valeria—she is a successful woman whose fame ends up putting him in ridiculous situations; posters with her face are everywhere in the city, even at the bus stop where a police crew pulls him over. And this police crew does him the favour of not fining him, because they have identified him as “the lady’s husband.”

Indeed, up to a point, Valeria is a woman who stands on her own feet, a bit too level-headed, almost cold, who can make Mihai feel insignificant with no effort at all. It is enough for her to look at him ironically or to toss a few cutting words his way to stir up in his soul a seething of anger and fear. Before her, at the house in Izvorani, the two lovers seem like high-school pupils caught by the form mistress kissing in a corner of the school, at a loss how to talk their way out of it.

Yet Valeria too knows how to be a slip of a girl; not long ago she was running through the snow and having a snowball fight with Mihai in the very garden of this house, the man recalls. It was the same “catch-me-and-let-me-go” game of the women in his life, the game that stirs the protagonist so much without his being aware, either, of why. Where does this weakness come from?

The Mother

Well, along the psychoanalytic thread toward the past, we draw closer to the source. Mihai, the businessman who can buy his mistress a racing car with a snap of the fingers, or board a plane at random and hand the woman an instant dream holiday, is very much his mother’s boy (Alecsandra Anca)—an elegant, old-fashioned lady who lives in an annex of his house, with wide access to his intimate life. With her principles and her conservative nature, the lady sides with Valeria, not necessarily because she likes her, but because such a thing simply is not done: to bring your lover, until recently a mistress, into the bed that has not yet “gone cold.” In her eyes, the son is both a man who has the right to assert his claim to a personal life and to happiness, and the boy who can be caught in emotional blackmail. If he does not get rid of the mistress, the lady will move in with Valeria or, worse, into an old-age home. Reaching this point, we are fairly safe in saying that the appeal to guilt before a female authority is a button that has been pushed since childhood. In time, this guilt has taken the shape of the feeling that he has no right to replace his mother with a life partner. Just as he would now have no right to put anyone else in the place of his former life partner.

Further on, the strange sensation that everything he lives through has happened at some point before, that he is caught in a game with no way out—not necessarily unpleasant, not necessarily exasperating; the game of love has its limits and its satisfactions, its prohibitions and its gratifications; the important thing is to keep calm and talk to each of them separately. And when he can no longer manage it, he can appeal to the authority of the raised voice, snap at everyone, bundle the women into the car, and see afterwards how he will cope.

Beyond the unnecessary choice of the subjective angle (the déjà-vus are justified psychologically, not formally), the poor lighting of some scenes, and certain dialogues that would have benefited from greater definition, the film manages to unfold, skilfully and seemingly simply, a neuralgic psychology drawn from the matriarchal Balkan-Oriental culture, authentically and with a discreet humour. On top of that, it has a twist in the plot of the loveliest kind, which makes things even more amusing. But no spoilers at the end…