AURORA

This observational study centres on Viorel, a middle-aged metalworker in Bucharest. The divorcee has become a kind of “dead man walking” due to sleep deprivation. Frustrated by the people around him, he lives in a shabby flat whose emptiness reflects his impoverished social structures. Cristi Puiu’s film shows two fatal days during which Viorel neither sleeps nor rests, abandoning all pretence of normal daily life. He begins to follow people, sometimes training the sights of his shotgun on the prey he is stalking. AURORA is also an examination of time, which plays a role of its own: divided into blown-up slices, long takes, hard cuts, occasional leaps and bounds. Director Puiu, who plays Viorel, permits the audience to make sense of the plot only at the end of his almost excessively slow thriller. In his three-hour opus of uncertainty and violence the last shreds of compassion or hope give way to desperation and tristesse, but what is important in life shimmers through the bleakness all the same. AURORA screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2010.