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STUFF AND DOUGH
Produced & Directed by Cristi Puiu
Written by Puiu & Razvan Radulescu
Director of Photography, Silviu Stavila
Edited by Ines Barbu & Nita Chivulescu
Released by Mitropoulos Films
Romania. 91 min. Not Rated
Romanian with English subtitles
With Alexandru Papadopol, Dragos Bucur, Ioana Flora, Luminita Gheorghiu Razvan Vasilescu

Stuff and Dough mostly unfolds in the course of a bumpy four-hour road trip, and it’s about as much fun as taking one. Romanian director Cristi Puiu preceded his acclaimed second feature The Death of Mr. Lazarescu with this debut, another meditation on everyday life. Ovidiu (Alexandru Papadopol), a young man from a port town, drives to Bucharest to deliver a bag of “stuff” for a gangster who offers to pays him a lot of “dough.” Ovidiu, whose parents run a small grocery stall out of their apartment, hopes to use the money to buy a kiosk of his own. And it’s fitting perhaps that Puiu’s film is about as ambitious as Ovidiu’s humble plans.

When a director chooses to minimalize every artistic element of a film – plot, script, acting – to expose a plain, unfiltered reality, that reality had better be incredibly pithy or incredibly insightful. If it’s neither, the film must somehow address the question of why it absolutely had to be made. But during the hour or so of the long, uneventful car ride with Ovidiu, his cocky friend Vali (Dragos Bucur), and Vali’s flighty, tagalong girlfriend, the answer kept eluding me. And with the threat from a tail-gaiting red jeep serving as the only distraction from the trio’s tedious chitchat, a compelling element was no where to found.

The director’s main impulse seems to be capturing the essence of ordinary Romanians with painstaking fidelity. Characterized as a weary, lethargic lot, Puiu sneaks a lens into their narrow world, recording their woes and limitations. Watching Ovidiu and his family shuffle about their small apartment, making sugary coffee, and lugging beer from the bathtub to the family kiosk, the latent anthropologist in every one of us feels somewhat nourished. Unfortunately, our latent film critic is left to starve.

Though discovering the quotidian habits of a foreign culture – especially one as distant and cinematically underrepresented as Romania’s – is rarely a dull exercise, but an unedited video from a hidden camera in a random Bucharest apartment could have produced a similar (if not more interesting) effect. And while the plot is somewhat seasoned by the unusual nature of the trip, Stuff and Dough, is, sad to say, like a boring episode of art-house reality TV, laudable for its honesty and skill, but best avoided for its meager artistic aspiration. Yana Litovsky
April 23, 2008