THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD

“Why aren’t you happy?” ask the people who’ve done so much for Delia. “Let her learn the hard way,” says the father about a daughter who doesn’t seem to know what’s good for her. But Delia actually learns a great deal on that hot day in Bucharest, even if she just expected to take receipt of the car she won in a competition. As the story gradually unfolds, it becomes clear that the complications are due to the adults. It begins innocently enough: the family packed into the car, the daughter asking, “Are we there yet?” It is soon only too obvious that everyone’s out for their own profit. Delia’s parents can’t stop drooling over her lucrative prize, and resort to ever-more drastic means to get their hands on the goods she so stubbornly refuses to part with. And the boss of the major soft-drinks company sponsoring the competition desperately needs a PR photograph showing a radiant prize-winner with a gleaming smile. The consistent realism of Radu Jude’s narrative is what makes it shocking.Simmering below the realistic surface is a wicked satire, a psychogram of a society perverted by its slavery to capitalism. Ultimately, nothing is authentic, and emotional outbursts are strategic weapons; it is no coincidence that marketing specialists have adopted the vocabulary of war. Delia emerges with a partial victory from this particular battle of aspiring marketeers, but only because she beats the adults at their own game. What she loses in the process is nothing less than her childish dreams and spirited defiance – sacrificed on the initiatory altar of capitalism.