Review: Humoresque – Humoresca (2007)

Director: Diana Deleanu | 16 minutes | documentary | Featuring: Maria Ozon, Constantin Ozon

The film opens with a civil servant reciting a 2002 measure. Young married people, ie people who want to start a family, are entitled to a subsidy of two hundred euros by the government. Then you see an old woman scurrying around on a small, shabby farm and a man smoking or staring in front of him on the veranda. In between, beautiful music is played and Romanian proverbs appear on beautiful boards like from the silent film.

Maria cannot read or write. She was the eldest of a large family and had to help her mother raise the younger children. After that it was hard work again, especially after the collectivization of agriculture under the communists. Despite all the promises, life didn’t get any better. After the fall of the communist party, nothing changed and she is still without running water or electricity. The only bright spot in her life is the emergence from nowhere of Constantin, with whom she has been together for a lifetime without the involvement of a mayor or priest to make their relationship official. But that is about to change.

“Humoresque” is a small, shiny gem. The scurrying of the old people is portrayed in such a way not at all pitying or pathetic that you immediately feel sympathy for these people who have worked so hard and are empty-handed, but at the same time are proud of themselves and above all love each other. The ironic way in which the quoted Romanian proverbs serve as an illustration for all the unfulfilled promises of the various authorities or life itself makes the bitter subject easy to digest. And that humorous streak is justified. Constantin’s broad smile after the wedding is triumphant, this is not a man beaten by life at all, this is a man who marries his great love and Mary has finally managed to fool those fallen authorities by strictly following the law. to keep. A moving and witty gem.