Adverts. Often the cue to stop watching the TV and make a cup of tea, but Romania’s four-time Oscar representative Radu Jude has gone the other way: he’s created a bold, if at times confusing, film made up solely of them.
The result is chaotic yet insightful. A five-minute ad break often feels too much, but Jude successfully makes 71 minutes and 30 years of ads exciting. It fits with his track record – a satirical and critical review of his native Romania – but this time the form is new.
Having included TikTok videos in his films before, Jude is no stranger to experimental film. In Eight Postcards he takes this one step further, with no story or apparent structure.
Cut, spliced, and thrown back together, Jude takes 30 years of adverts completely out of context. Having directed over 100 commercials before moving to film, he shifts from one ad to the next before the punchline. A couple in a car talk of tripe soup, money falls from the sky, and Cinderella sells shoes.
The viewer has to work hard, and at times, it is a struggle to find a message at all, yet the film hangs together through its sheer ridiculousness. The titlerefer to the film’s eight sections, each loosely following their own theme.
In ‘The Ages of Man’, we’re sold everything from Pampers to dentures. Each one is a scrapbook of modern life. We are born, we live and then we die, and along the way we require an alarming amount of laundry detergent. The concept seems ingenious if it were to hit our TV screens. Does a film about ads have ad breaks?
Jude’s decision to use TV ads takes us back to the heyday of mass marketing. Now, #ads are increasingly personalised, diffuse, and aim to be almost indiscernible. This film’s effect is the opposite.
Co-directed by philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz, the political and historical significance behind slogans like ‘What belongs to all belongs to no one’ is obvious. As the country shifted from socialist state to capitalist economy, Jude presents beer, laptops and pantyhose as representations of increasingly nationalist, consumerist and sexist Romanian social attitudes. Opening itself up to globalisation, brands like Pepsi, Gillette, and Colgate are inescapable (although surprisingly no Coca Cola-nisation).
The result is a tongue-in-cheek film that tells its own story of recent Romanian (and our own) history through bad acting, low budgets, and slapstick comedy.
It works. Jude combines serious critique with humour, making us look at TV ads in a new light – what are we doing with all this stuff? Did anyone fall for slogans like ‘the taste of the tastey taste’? After this, the last thing you want to do is buy anything.
