The Reenactment

The Reenactment Romanian Reconstituirea is a 1968 blackandwhite film by Romanian director Lucian Pintilie. It is based on a novel by Horia Ptracu, which in turn reflects reallife events witnessed by the author. Produced under the communist regime, which it indirectly criticizes, it is a tragicomedy about incompetence, indifference and misuse of power. Structured as a film within a film and largely shot as a mockumentary, The Reenactment stars George Constantin as a prosecutor who keeps in custody two minor delinquents, Vuic and Nicu, played respectively by George Mihi and Vladimir Gitan. He makes them reenact their drunken brawl at a restaurant, and is helped in this effort by the militiaman Dumitrescu played by Ernest Maftei and a film crew. Two bystanders watch upon the youngsters degradation at the hands of the prosecutor. They are The Miss Domnioara in the original, played by Ileana Popovici, who is amused by the succession of events, and the pedantic alcoholic Paveliu Emil Botta.

Both Horia Ptracus novel and the screenplay coauthored by Ptracu and Pintilie are closely based on reallife events. The incident was witnessed by Ptracu during the early 1960s, and took place in his native town of Caransebe, shortly before a celebration of AugustCommunist Romanias national holiday, commemorating the 1944 coup. The militiamen involved had detained two youths with no prior criminal record, accusing them of having been drunk and disorderly, and had decided to make them reenact the scene in order to educate the public about the perils of alcohol. In a 1999 interview, Ptracu acknowledges that, as a university student and parttime activist at a local culture house, he was a member of the original crew.Like in the film, the militiamens decision seems to have outweighed the punishment proscribed for such offences they made the youths film the same scene over and over, and, in the process, exposed them to public humiliation. Ptracu, who credits German writer Erich Maria Remarque and his All Quiet on the Western Front with having inspired his narrative, states At the actual, filmed reenactment I for one had a terrible shock. They were children, they were just children. The police made them do what they had previously done. But that was a beach, a pool, there were girlies wearing bathing suits, some of them were connected with those girlies, and the militiamen were making them do what they had done when they were drunk, which was absurd, which made me shiver. In both story and film, Vuic dies after his friend, pressured by the authorities into making the reenactment look more authentic, hits him over the head with a stone. ........

Source: Wikipedia