Matcollis This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Iseerphia All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

lasttimeisaw Actor-turned-director Horatiu Malaele's debut feature, jumping on the bandwagon of Romanian New Wave movement in the noughties, SILENT WEDDING abandons itself to its categorically anti-Soviet ideologue nearly at the expense of a galvanizing story. The frame story is set in the present day Romania, a TV crew specializing in paranormal stories, arrives in a desolate area used to be a Communist factory, affected by a spine-tingling frisson whipped up by the presence of a ghostly bride and the remnant old women-in-black there, a witness recounts the harrowing extirpation of the village to build the factory in 1953, the year when Joseph Stalin died. A joyous and rumbustious flashback makes heavy weather about its bucolic landscape and community, peopled by foul-mouthed but overall congenial countryfolk, amongst which a pair of young lovers Mara (Andreea Victor) and Iancu (Potocean) are going to get married (their mutual orgasm is rendered in exhilarating high pitch). Concomitantly Malaele threads farcical episodes of Communist party recruitment (highlighted by slo-motion and slapstick antics) into the through-line, where an event of open-air cinema is interrupted by a passing circus, whose own hilarity is sequentially, abruptly bookended by a tragic death of a young village girl (implied at the hands of a Russian type) and the departure of Iancu's best friend, the homunculus Sile (Palin). On that wedding day, bad tidings is brought by a Soviet officer that due to the death of Stalin the night before, the whole country is entering a 7-days mourning, wedding is forbidden, anyone who revolts will be executed with high treason. Thus, it triggers the "silent wedding", a weighty defiance against authoritarianism, the film reaches its winning apotheosis in the collectively endeavored cooperation to not make any jarring noise in their covert celebration, including using cloth-wrapped glasses, eating with one's hands instead of crockery, miming and mouthing wedding toasts, the wedding band playing silently and a chucklesome message-passing skit, et.al., until a final moment of liberation that sounds their death knell, the authority is as good as his words. That theatrical kicker (embellished with a surreal touch), to some degree, negates the film's prior effort of ingenuity by veering into an easy route to meet its prefigured perdition and its wraith-of-the-past coda. An anomaly repulsing the post-Cold War ethos, SILENT WEDDING, although errs on the side of its own militancy, lands on its feet in its grassroots advocacy and comedic appeal.

cix_one The director is a well known-Romanian stage actor, and the movie (his directorial debut) shows it - or suffers from it, depending on your point of view. The subject of the picture is inspired from a true and painful story of repression under communism. The story is told with humor, but many times the humor is over the top, cheapening somewhat the tragedy that swept over the Eastern block after the second world war.The movie is framed as a fantasy/allegory the director and his crew take a few liberties with the script. The editing however is a bit sloppy (modern cars showing in the background in the field scene, mike booms cutting into the frame) and that left me with a tinge of disappointment.On the bright side, the director's brilliance as an artist shines through in many scenes, such as one in which he masterfully and seamlessly weaves in a silent black and white comedy scene in the best Laurel and Hardy tradition.

sh_bronstein I fully agree with the brave reviewers who warned that this movie is indeed a waste of time. (I really wonder if the good reviews were written by the director's relatives, or if they watched another film.) At any rate I do not think this is in any way worthwhile because it is like a shallow home-movie, with a screenplay written by drunk men at a bar like the one shown in the film. The film is full of vulgarity and crudity, full of obscenities that seem to be meant to be funny... I thought it was base and boorish. The plot takes too long to become interesting, that is, in case it ever does, I stopped watching at some point. It was just too gross and an insult to intelligence. There are many good eastern European films out there, but this is definitely one to avoid.Many of those who praised the film in this website mentioned that people who don't come from Romania cannot grasp it. I watched it with a person born there and he hated it. I think the movie is just plain junk. The fact that it is supposed to criticize communism is just an ideological excuse to make the film sound deeper than it really is. As to the commentator who tried to sound convincing about the evils of communism citing that Romanians who fought on the Eastern front "saw" how bad communism was during the war -- I must point out, that these "Romanians fighting on the Eastern front" were fighting together with the Nazis against the Soviet Union in WWII, perpetrating horrible crimes against humanity, and are NOT a "source" I would consider trustworthy.

andreeeei This is maybe the best movie I have seen. It made me get an IMDb account to rate it 10 stars. I don't care about technical judgments about this movie. It's a Romanian emotional roller-coaster which pictures our recent history in a tragical and comical frame. It's one of the few movies I have ever watched at the cinema where at the end of which lots of people applauded. Romanians are recognizing themselves in the story and they find coherence in their identity and this makes the movie a masterpiece and a great service to the people of this country.One more thing that I appreciate in this movie is a reparation done within the history of the subjective experience. People from the village were at best ignoring communists and poking fun of them if they were not hating them. Nobody was happy to give away their land and village men knew what communism can bring, since they saw it with their own eyes when they fought on the Eastern front.Most people hated communism and they tried to live a normal life in silence, just like it happens in the movie. Humor was maybe the best survival resource.I live in Romania and I know from personal experience and thorough study what Russians did bring under the name of communism. I don't try to convince anyone that the so called communism was criminal and implemented locally with the help of the weakest links (like in the movie), low educated people with low morals, since there is enough literature today for anyone that has any doubt. Of course, as somebody mentions here, Romanians too did their horrible crimes on the Eastern front, but this does not mean that what the people like the ones in the movie endured, did any kind of humane justice. The people that fought on the Eastern front are a good source, since they were regular soldiers, not vicious criminals and even if they were vicious criminals, they could anyway still have seen the "benefits" that "communism" has brought to Russia.I understand why some people consider it propagandistic, but in my view this is a good artistical work upon the subjective experience and life of ordinary Romanians in 1953.