Radu Jude’s adaptation of Gianina Cărbunariu’s play Uppercase Print opens with footage scrapped from a 1980s Romanian television broadcast, in which three actors declaim a nationalist poem in praise of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his communist regime that begins: “Your every waking hour is for our dear homeland.” They prepare for a second take, clearing their throats, moistening their lips, and glancing around. After several seconds of awkwardness, they finally admit to the film crew that there’s no text on the teleprompter.
Any illusion of spontaneous patriotic feeling evaporates as we glimpse the malfunctioning mechanism behind it. It’s tempting to write this off as Jude poking fun at cartoonish propaganda, but it’s clear that he’s also prompting us to see something in the film itself as artifice, flimsier than a Parliamentary Palace made out of Q-Tips. And there’s a pathos to this awkwardness, a desperation, that Jude extracts from such scenes throughout Uppercase Print.
Uppercase Print’s plot follows a secret police investigation into pro-democracy graffiti that results in the arrest, interrogation, and “reintegration” of one Mugur Călinescu (Serban Lazarovici), a teenager inspired by Radio Free Europe to single-handedly inject some truth into his repressive environment. Transcriptions of police evidence—including witness statements, excerpts from Călinescu’s confession, statements made by his mother (Ioana Iacob), and telephone conversations captured by wiretap—make up the dialogue.
The minimalist set, which we see in an overhead long shot early on as a janitor sweeps it out with a push broom, consists of a walled, circular stage divided into color-coded sections like a pie chart, allowing the camera stationed at its center to rotate when transitioning between scenes. Each section represents an aspect of state surveillance or media control, with icons on the walls depicting a tape recorder, a television set, a wiretap playback device, and a classroom. The actors stand motionless in the appropriate section and deliver their lines in a style not so much deadpan as unacted, like schoolchildren reciting facts by rote.
Jude intercuts the action with scraps of footage taken from state documentary TV programs, the absurdity of which is emphasized by asinine music and juxtaposition with the police investigation. In one such sequence, a film crew interviews motorists who’ve violated a new noise prohibition by honking. Another presents Father Christmas as the communist state, refusing gifts to “lazy” children. In perhaps the most troubling, Ceaușescu nods and shuffles along to a folk dance with the soundtrack removed. Awkward yet ominous, this silent pageantry reveals that desperation just beneath the surface of the dictator’s personality cult. Such sequences, farcical as they are, come as a relief from the zero-affect investigation—a relief one combats with the awareness of their intent to indoctrinate and disinform.
The source material has left its mark on the film, which can at times feel like an exercise in Brechtian alienation, taking a sledge hammer to the fourth wall to prevent the viewer from becoming too immersed. Still, with the montage of archival footage, Uppercase Print shows as much influence from Jean-Luc Godard and Dušan Makavejev as Brecht. It’s a pity that all this ironizing formalism feels so worn out, that the clockwork alternation between action and archive lacks the organic, hybrid quality of, say, Makavejev’s Innocence Unprotected.
That said, there’s more at stake here than recycling dated techniques to criticize a fallen regime. In the film’s coda, Jude turns his myth-cracking eye on present-day Romania, placing the camera on a busy street in Bucharest and rotating it, as though it were still at the center of a set, to frame billboards advertising Louis Vuitton and the like, showing how one form of propaganda replaced another after the fall of communism in Romania.
Back on set, ex-secret police agents sit at a table in a pastiche of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, with the head of the lead investigator (Bogdan Zamfir) haloed by a klieg lamp, and make excuses for their role in enforcing state repression, talking as if they were its true martyrs. Uppercase Print insists that we not be taken in by new, more sophisticated methods of obfuscation, and to see power for what it is, regardless of how it presents itself.
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