"I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians"

Ioana Iacob

Radu Jude's "I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians", released in 2018, is a sardonic reflection on Romania's complicity in the Holocaust. The great Ioana Iacob plays Mariana, a theater director who is putting on a dramatic reenactment in a town square. The reenactment concerns the capturing of Odessa by Romanian and German forces fighting against Russian troops in 1941 and the subsequent pogrom. The title of the film is a quote from Mihai Andronescu, Romanian Foreign Minister at the time, who oversaw the elimination of nearly 20,000 Jews and other undesirables. Despite many obstacles, Mariana pulls the production off, but the effect on the audience is not what she expected.

One of the many pleasures one encounters in a Jude film is that it can't be boiled down to a thesis. There is antithesis, synthesis, and many layers of allusions and meanings. A local government poohbah confronts Mariana about the production, threatening to shut it down because it might upset pro-nationalist sensibilities. The back and forth between the two skirts on the edge of didacticism, "it is not anti-Romanian, but facing up to our own history" Mariana baldly states, but the skill of the actors make these moments palpable. The government official is well played by Alexandru Dabija, himself a noted stage director and actor, who was equally effective in Jude's Aferim!. Mariana is also beset by a possible pregnancy, the result of a liaison with a feckless married lover. Jude obviously admires his struggling heroine, just as he does in this film's twin in his canon, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. The tactility of both film's domestic scenes, with their matter of fact nudity, ground works that threaten to disappear into semantic arguments or hysterical group theater. 

As in all his most recent films, Jude offers up a panoply of references and insinuations. Marx, Wittgenstein, Jean Ancel, Thomas Kuhn are all name checked, as are figures from the world of film including Romania's greatest deceased director Lucian Pintilie (I highly recommend his films The Oak and An Unforgettable Summer, if you can track them down), Alain Resnais, and D.W. Griffith. In fact, Mariana cheekily titles her production, The Birth of a Nation. So, these references are not for their own sake, but also point to one of I Do Not Care...'s themes: the universality of genocide which is also the theme of Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour and Pintilie's An Unforgettable Summer. Mariana and her production team wade through footage of various atrocities, fictional films, and newsreel footage. She constantly has a book in her hand, always looking for another angle to the story while wading through the postmodern jumble of today's media.

Mariana, like Jude himself, learns that she is bound to be misunderstood in a world where the pageantry of mass media can be misconstrued as an endorsement rather than a denunciation. Is the search for truth a comical illusion when the audience is dazzled by beautiful artifice? Dabija's character tellingly refers to Mariana as 'Leni Riefenstahl'. The crowd claps along as the Nazis, in this The Birth of a Nation, march into Odessa to the beat of a military band. Mariana expects a silent chill when Jews are incinerated in her production, but the crowd is so impressed by the spectacle that they wildly applaud. I'll give this to Mr. Jude, surely one of our best working filmmakers, he does not crave an uncritical audience.