The Oak

Returning to Romania after a decades-long exile in Paris, theater director and filmmaker Lucian Pintilie fashioned this blisteringly apocalyptic parable/farce, appropriately set during the last days of Ceauşescu’s rule. A willfully independent Bucharest schoolteacher and a talented doctor find their skills are no match for the incompetence, brutality, and general insanity of Romania, where hospital patients are tossed on the floor and pedestrians hurl themselves in front of passing cars. A film that “seems to flourish in the rubble” (Anthony Lane, New Yorker), The Oak is a full-throttle assault of “imaginative hysteria that rattles with sustained fury” (J. Hoberman).