Many a short film that is later expanded into a feature feels reverse-engineered for that specific purpose: an eye-catching taster of what is clearly intended as a larger work, though perhaps not wholly satisfying as a miniature. Bogdan Mureșanu‘s much-lauded 2018 short “The Christmas Gift” — a European Film Award winner for best short film, among other accolades — didn’t seem such a case. Poignant and darkly funny as it evoked a child’s-eye view of political terror via an inadvertent act of protest, it was a perfectly self-contained detail of a wider historical canvas. In Mureșanu’s complex, involving debut feature “The New Year That Never Came,” however, “The Christmas Gift” is cleverly recontextualized as one of several intimate, integrated vignettes, composing a fraying tapestry of Romanian social and political turmoil in the country’s final days of communist rule.
Against a unifyingly momentous milieu — namely, the wintry week of revolution that preceded the accelerated downfall, trial and execution of communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu on Christmas Day 1989 — the film’s accumulation of human micro-dramas gathers a real sense of scale and momentum. A little overlong at 138 minutes, and a little opaque in its opening stretch, this is nonetheless a symphonic work that earns its sustained, unsubtle use of Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro” throughout its rousing climax, with an audience-friendly arthouse sweep that won it the top prize in Venice’s Orizzonti competition last year, and more recently the New Voices New Visions Award at Palm Springs. A writer who pivoted to filmmaking in middle age, Mureșanu plainly intends to join the most ambitious rank of contemporary Romanian auteurs.
Unfolding over just two days in a Bucharest sapped of seasonal spirit, as white-hot, sidewalk-level fury at the Ceaușescu regime cuts through the December cold, “The New Year That Never Came” gains considerable dramatic irony from the sheer rapidity of the president’s impending ruin: Nobody here knows that he’ll be dead in less than a week, or that the post-communist age of Romania is nearly upon them. Panic and paranoia over the consequences of either criticizing or endorsing the current dictatorship run through most of the knotted narrative strands making up Mureșanu’s original script; whispers of a government-ordered massacre of protesters over in distant Timișoara escalate over the course of proceedings to a collective, enraged yell.
The Timișoara tragedy weighs particularly heavily on the mind of Florina (Nicoleta Hancu, first among equals in a fine ensemble), a stage actor who receives an offer she can’t refuse — much as she’d like to do so — when the producers of a stodgily patriotic New Year’s Eve TV special get in touch: The show is already in the can, but their previous, more famous star is persona non grata after recently defecting, so lookalike Florina is needed to re-record her scenes. The gig promises Florina the biggest exposure of her career, but she balks at having to deliver a “mandatory homage” to Ceaușescu on camera, praising him as “the living symbol of love for this country.” Producer Stefan (Mihai Calin) is also distracted: his college-age son Laurentiu (Andrei Miercure) has attracted the interest of the dreaded Secret Police after appearing in a satirical student play, and is attempting to flee the country.
One of the investigating cops, Ionut (Iulian Postelnicu), is likewise preoccupied with personal matters, having just moved his stubborn, depressive mother Margareta (Emilia Dobrin) into a new apartment after her longtime home was slated for demolition by the government. Emotionally unable to let go of the old place, she asks a favor of one of the hired movers, Gelu (Adrian Vancica) — whose own story is where “The Christmas Gift” slots neatly into proceedings. Simultaneously droll and devastating, this tale of the domestic fallout when Gelu’s young son naively parrots his father’s wish for the death of Ceaușescu in a letter to Santa Claus remains the sharpest and most bitterly comic of the film’s braided stories.
After an introduction that may leave some viewers adrift as a flurry of characters is introduced without much supporting context, Mureșanu and editors Vanja Kovacevic and Mircea Lacatus find a deftly rotating rhythm for their many-headed narrative, identifying common personal and political threads in parallel strands while maintaining a keen, ticking sense of linear time. Only Laurentiu’s individual story feels slightly under-developed relative to its counterparts; otherwise, the thematic and demographic contrasts between sequences are considered and informative.
Shooting fluidly in a cramped Academy ratio that channels the TV broadcasts on which much of the story hinges — all the better to seamlessly weave archival footage into the final reel — cinematographers Boroka Biro and Tudor Platon capture the cheerlessness of Communism’s last gasp in their palette of dun browns and wan institutional blues. Ditto the period production and costume design, exactingly dingy in each detail from clunky rotary phones to knobbly knitwear, but without a hint of retro-fab nostalgia: If the past is a foreign country, the future, or at least the ’90s, beckons with some promise of home.