Alternate title(s):
Foreign Title: Balanța
Date: January 01, 1992 to December 31, 1992
Dates Note: 1992
Country of Origin:
Romania
Place of Origin: Romania
Languages:
Romanian
Color: Color
Silent: No
Based On: the novel by Ion Baiesu
Additional Info:
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).