"PHILANTROPIQUE"

AN ENDLESS COMEDY ABOUT CHARITY BUSINESS

The ones who know the Spanish film "Família", by Fernando León de Aranoa, know what it means to make up reality based on lies. Or else, making actors interpret misleading roles, on revolving ground, where at every new sequence the doubt if the acted roles are fake or not increases. Even better, if the character playing the role of the son is actually a son or takes part in a great play set by a solitary character that hires actors to play his birthday party, surrounded by a hired family.

The excellent Romanian film "Philantropique" (picture) opened last June in the French capital, after winning the Audience Award at the 17th Festival du Film de Paris. It takes to a scary level of sophistication the lying circuit in human relations. It is a black, refined humor comedy, the fourth feature by the Romanian director Nae Caranfil. It makes fun of the philanthropy and charity institution. It is implacable with social rules and sets the paranoid of a big social theater founded in lies.

The text that comes on the first images on the screen is acidly sarcastic:

"Once upon a time there was a city
whose inhabitants were either 'princes' or 'beggars'.
Between these two worlds, all you could find was stray dogs.
They formed the middle-class."

A teacher in the shoes of a frustrated writer conduces the flash-back narration in an upsetting sequence where he is humiliated in a fancy restaurant when confessing to the maître he cannot afford the astronomic bill of the dinner he offered his wife to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Humiliation is followed by the solidarity gesture of a rich good soul sitting at the opposite table, who solves his problem by paying his bill.

This is when the film starts to turn back and the teacher takes off in front of the viewer the pieces of the giant puzzle of philanthropy social theater, which makes money of other people's misery. We see, little by little, that there aren't main or secondary characters without a good role. Real life theater is a continuous setup, with all-age beggars serving and being exploited by the same cynical boss.

We also see that the play has only one endless act, which unfolds in ways that play tricks on us and puzzles us. The teacher-actor, leading the narration, confesses in these memories what a great fool he is. But it doesn't stop him from being a good actor. The unaffordable dinner scene repeats itself every evening in a different fancy restaurant. Always counting on the presence of a charitable soul who ends up by paying the bill. The profit of the fake dinners is afterwards shared by the authors of the play. Without being totally aware of it, the frustrated writer brings us a deep reflection work, a world that has no place for mercy. Where not even alms seem to get to the ones who really need it.

A recent article published by 'Le Monde' denounces the new gypsy mafias that would be taking over post-Ceausescu fake communist proletarian dictatorship. These mafias would direct an organized begging industry with extra-border branches around Schengen treaty Western Europe, especially exploiting handicapped beggars. Caranfil's comedy is the expression of this tragedy.

Scattered around the world, and victims of several prejudices, the real gypsies dream of the creation of a sovereign territory. Their logical destiny would be Romania, once this is where 2 of the 2,6 million gypsies spread around Europe are. Gypsy-origin intellectuals ask for their people to be called "Rom", meaning home in the gypsy dialect, rejecting "gypsy", for it has become an injurious adjective along obscure years.

Leon Cakoff, for 'Jornal da Mostra