It’s a frustrating case of individual triumph cancelling out collective cohesion in this sporadically enjoyable, if tonally mismatched, anthology of five short films, each intent on skewering the political corruption that set in during the final 15 years of the Ceaucescu regime in Romania (touted as ‘The Golden Age’). Scripted by Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days), the film feeds its tall tales (or ‘legends’) through an absurdist comic mangle in order to explore the cruel ironies bubbling beneath the surface of party policy. While the hits far outweigh the misses, it’s still something of a struggle to ingest a ‘would you believe it?’ funny such as The Legend of the Party Photographer (which hilariously riffs on the draconian censorship of state newspaper Scinteia) when followed by the more melancholy likes of The Legend of the Chicken Driver (about a bashful trucker who instigates a poultry scam to impress a woman). Impressive, then, but really uneven.

David Jenkins

From Time Out London

Dir Hanno Höfer, Razvan Marculescu, Cristian Mungiu, Constantin Popescu, Ioana Uricaru, 2009, 131 mins, screens on Fri 12 & Fri 19 as the opening film of the ifva Festival