Sean Glass

Fernando de Fuentes’ El Prisonero Trece (Prisoner 13) (1933), El Compadre Mendoza (Our Buddy Mendoza) (1934) and Vamanos con Pancho Villa (Let’s Go with Pancho Villa) (1936) are a trilogy in the sense of the tone, themes and historical context that they live in, but to be clear, they are comprised of separate narratives. What they have most in common are the themes of corruption and hypocrisy, both moral and political.

Few have ever seen a film like Andrei Ujica’s The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, and even fewer have seen it presented in such a way—as an art form. It is important to pay attention to the title. Director Andrei Ujica aims to make a film where former President of Romania Nicolae Ceausescu (1918-1989) tells his own story.

Noe’s subjective camera spends much of the first half in the hands of Oscar, while we watch the world through his eyes, and the second half of the film overhead, racing through hundreds of rooms with masked cuts. It lends an incomparable theatricality to the experience.

Clearly good friends, their relationship in real life seems to reflect their relationship in the film. They are brother and sister, however, this is a Gaspar Noe film, so there’s always something a little off. Their very close relationship is mired by the tension of implied incestuous feelings throughout, even though those feelings are never consummated.

It’s really the most American-ized French film I've seen in quite a while. The fact that this film succeeds is an even greater surprise given those behind it, relatively new scribes Laurent Zeitoun, Jeremy Doner and Yohan Gromb decorate the rom com with espionage elements that serve to increase the effectiveness of both formulas.