Mitropoulos Films
Left to right: Alexandru Papadopol as Ovidiu, Dragos Bucur as Vali and Ioana Flora as Bety, as seen in "Stuff and Dough."
I'm still buried under an ongoing avalanche of Tribeca films, but I need to gulp some oxygen and fling out some love for a couple of movies playing in actual theaters. So far only Tribeca-overwhelmed New Yorkers can catch "Stuff and Dough," the dark, funny, mysteriously affecting 2001 debut of Romanian director Cristi Puiu, who would go on to make the award-winning "Death of Mr. Lazarescu." (It's never played in the United States before.) Like so many recent Romanian films, "Stuff and Dough" is tremendously well made on almost no budget, and blends the rhythms of ordinary life with a subtly ominous atmosphere and elements of thriller. It follows a young entrepreneur and two of his no-account friends as they take a road trip across Romania's dull central plain, on a dubious errand for a local mobster.
Along the way, Ovidiu (Alexandru Papadopol), his loutish buddy Vali (Dragos Bucur) and Vali's girlfriend Betty (Ioana Flora) must deal with many delights of life in post-Communist Romania, from mysterious assailants to corrupt cops, bad roads, fuel shortages and the erratic prices of cooking oil and Coca-Cola. It's a terrific little movie, gritty, real, ironic, ruthless and deeply humane. Aspiring American filmmakers should study it before they go off and make yet another faux-earnest, self-pitying indie. (Now playing at Film Forum in New York; further engagements should follow.)