The best Dragoș Pîslaru’s movies

In 1925 Romania, young Marie-Therese Von Debretsy refuses the flirtatious advances of her husband's commanding officer. As a result, the cosmopolitan family is reassigned to a brutally bleak and dangerous outpost on the Bulgarian/Romanian frontier where both their relationship and humanity are severely tested.

In this interesting drama, three sequences which could have formed separate stories are linked together, like cars on a train, to give a larger perspective on the nature of reality and film. The three episodes are joined together by one film crew at work on two different jobs. In the beginning, the crew is introduced as they juggle their dual roles as State-supported propagandists who laud their government and society, and as private movie makers working on their own film. Next, they are in a restaurant looking for suitable locations to film when the eatery’s owner, through no fault of his own, is induced to wax long and lugubriously on his miserable life. In the last segment, two extras are in the background of a scene, sitting at a table in a restaurant. It slowly becomes apparent to one of them that the man he’s sitting with tortured him more than 40 years ago at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.