On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when many post-communist societies still appear unwilling or unable to deal with their totalitarian pasts, the Romanian production Tales from the Golden Age comes just in time.

Dryly ironic and subtly humorous – not unlike its title, the film tells several, separate narratives of different people’s lives in the last 15 years of the Ceausescu regime – a period that, according to the film-makers, was “the worst in Romania's history.” Each personal story unfolds on the background of the broader societal context and represents equally well both the characters’ individual struggles and the larger political picture in which they take place.

But the subject of Tales from the Golden Age is just one of the factors that makes the film a unique one. What truly sets it apart is that it manages to touch and convey a message to the audience in an organic way that goes beyond the story, cinematography and other factors usually considered by critics when assessing a film.

Audiences at the Warsaw Film Festival, which saw Tales from the Golden Age were treated to two episodes, lasting barely over an hour. As the credits began to roll at the end of the first screening, exasperated sighs and confused whispers could be heard across the packed cinema hall. Having read the festival’s official programme, viewers had, in fact, come prepared to watch a 138-minute film “composed of five short stories.”

At Cannes, where the film was premiered earlier this year, five of six episodes were shown per screening, though not always the same five or in the same order. At the time, the film’s producers told media they wanted to re-create the confusion of life under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu.

It can be argued that this effect was achieved in Warsaw too. The decision to split the film into two parts that would be shown separately was explained by its lengthiness. While this may be good news for viewers with a shorter attention span, those who believe that a film’s content can justify its more-than-average length will be disappointed.

In an e-mail, Cristian Mungiu – writer, producer and the main driving force behind the film, responded to this publication’s inquiry, saying that the project is now distributed and shown as two films – one containing four comic episodes and called Tales of Authority and the second, called Tales of Love, which consists of 2/3 episodes. Warsaw had elected to screen only the latter.

The two stories that audiences here got to see were The Legend of the Air Sellers and The Legend of the Chicken Driver. The other episodes, unscreened in Warsaw, include The Legend of the Official Visit, The Legend of the Party Photographer, The Legend of the Zealous Activist, and The Legend of the Greedy Policeman, according to the list provided in the film’s official press release.

And although this review can technically only reflect on the first two, it remains incomplete as, in the words of Telegraph’s Sukhdev Sandhu, the entire project “is the rare portmanteau that’s more than the sum of its parts.”

Air Sellers is as much a story about young love as about the regime’s ban on entrepreneurship and the masses’ unquestioning submission to authorities. In a time when private initiative did not exist, a boy and girl come up with an ingenious get-rich-quick scam. The two go around people’s apartments, pretending to take air and water samples in glass bottles that the inhabitants give them. They then sell the bottles to be recycled as a way to make money.

Although its characters belong to an older generation, The Legend of the Chicken Driver is also essentially a tale about love. In a time when even basic food supplies were hard to come by, with milk, sugar and eggs distributed as rations, a rule-obeying, unhappily-married truck driver eventually follows the advice of an attractive restaurant owner and appropriates the eggs of the chickens he is transporting.

In addition to having the theme of love in common, both of the episodes end with the main characters’ getting in trouble with the police. This successfully illustrates the extent to which Romanians lived in constant fear of the authorities in the late 1970s and through the 1980s.

Besides simply telling good stories, both of the tales screened in Warsaw also have the added benefit of painting a broader picture of what life was like under communism, not just in Romania but in many other places around Central and Eastern Europe. The first accomplishment of the film– the telling of good stories, is great news for all viewers, while its second dimension means that the film has the capacity to resonate with different types of audiences.

For those who have lived in the Communist Bloc before it crumbled, Tales of Love will surely stir memories of the time’s many absurdities, peculiar social practices and drab aesthetics. Although nine at the time of the regime’s collapse in Bulgaria, the author of this review was reminded of collecting glass bottles herself, in order to take them back for money. The depressingly shabby interiors of the flats featured in Air Sellers were not unlike many of her elementary schoolmates’ homes in Sofia’s high-rise apartment blocks. Gathering at the apartment that boasted the single video player in the entire building, and sometimes neighbourhood, in order to watch bootleg movies was not uncommon either.

Those who have never lived under communism, on the other hand, are offered a revealing and almost anthropological insight into what life was like for regular people under these regimes and the extent to which the system permeated and suppressed them.

Air Sellers and The Chicken Driver, because they were also bound by a certain melancholy, show a darker side of the regime. Nevertheless, it would not be unreasonable for the viewer to expect a similar effect from the remaining tales, which are said to be much more comical.

Finally, even though individual episodes are not attributed to a specific one of the five directors behind the project, connoisseurs of contemporary Romanian cinema will recognise Mungiu’s signature style in the two that were screened in Warsaw.

All in all, the tales of love were a sheer pleasure to watch, marred only by the disappointing discovery that they were only two and leaving the viewers wanting to see more and more tales of Romania’s Golden Age.

Tales from the Golden Age
(Amintiri din epoca de aur)
Dir: Cristian Mungiu, Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Höfer, Rãzvan Mãrculescu, Constantin Popescu
(Romania, France/2009)