The New Year that Never Came

Original title: Anul Nou care n-a fost

Directed by: Bogdan Mureșanu

Length: 138 min.

Country: Romania

Year. 2024

Premiere: Venice Film Festival 2024 - BEST FILM ORIZZONTI

Availability: screening in Romania startin September 24, 2024.

Synopsis: Six interconnected stories in Bucharest on the last night of the Ceausescu regime.

RATING: 3.5/5

REVIEW

To attain the universal through the intimate, is the mantra of The New Year that Never Came. An effect achieved through its settings: small living rooms, Dacia car interiors, narrow offices, that however are inhabited by a very vast plethora of characters that provide an actually vast volume. A contradictory dual nature for a film that like few outlines the climate of a nation just hours before history is written.

Six main threads outline the feature film, intertwined mostly only by chance encounters or proximity: often the film moves between characters because one happens to walk next to the other, or there are other similar links. A technique that immediately reminds of Kieslowski, even if hardly Mureșanu's debut appears derivative of the polish filmmaker, choosing a narration that in no way appears to have metaphysical connotations.

The New Year that Never Came embraces the very concrete and unforgivingly grounded in the literal sense, with a quasi abscence of a film score or the lack of spectacularisation - except for a pivotal scene. The feature instead seems to look back at the television documentary language of the time, with a handheld camera and copious uses of zoom, to achieve an almost improvised feeling.

Such a large number of characters as the ones featured in this film - portrayed by an impressive amount of romanian stars - and such a découpage mean that the film requires the viewer's attention in order not to miss details, to an extent that the unrewarding choice of style and the length sometimes lead to question whether this does not become too much to ask a viewer, considering that this is certainly not supposed to be slow cinema in the arthouse sense. 

It's hard to watch The New Year that Never Came and remember that this is a debut film, a first feature direction, be it because of its ambition, or its size, or its cast. Even if the film goes heavyhanded - maybe too mych - at places, it remains a memorable piece of cinema.