Eight Postcards from Utopia: Radu Jude’s twisted TV guide to Romanian history

• Reviewed from the 2024 Locarno Film Festival

There are many claims TV adverts have made for a frosted bottle of beer, from refreshment to intoxication to sexual success. However, “an experience as intense as life in Romania” is one of the more outlandish. But such a claim was made – and in this new film, Radu Jude, co-directing with philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz, takes the tagline at its word. Eight Postcards from Utopia, an experiment in sardonic screen archaeology, uses a montage of TV commercials from post-Revolutionary Romania to tell the story of the country’s last three-and-a-half decades. The phrase “found-footage movie” suggests horror, but the only ghoul prowling this labyrinth of the hard-sell is capitalism. 

This witty ad-alanche, rapidly cut by Jude’s regular editor Cătălin Cristuțiu, has no narration but is chapterised into sections, based on the adverts’ content or style. Some are more successful than others. The least is ‘The Ages of Man’, in which ads depict the stages of life, pushing baby milk to heart medicine, with a succession of supposedly typical white males who take a keen interest in the quality and price of laundry detergent, beer, razors, shoe polish and more beer. A juddery blurb for ‘antistress tablets’ suggests life in Romania can sometimes be more intense than anticipated. 

The most direct in terms of narrative is the first, ‘History of Romania’: a speed-run through the nation’s heritage as co-opted by brands. We begin in Roman Dacia with Pepsi and romp through the medieval era to wind up in the Communist decades with footage of a Ceausescu rally being used to sell mobile phones. Understandably, the commercials dwell on the newfound possibilities of the post-socialist era, celebrating nightclubs, share offers, or an American-style fast-food restaurant called Sheriff’s. A moustachioed man beams from a casino table: “As a new world is born, this place is reborn.” 

The products (pagers!), fashions and attitudes shown are bound to trigger nostalgia. That twinge may become a full-blown pang for Romanians who grew up seeing these clips on TV. While many scenes are universal, from the nods of housewife-approval for Tide detergent to red-and-white-suited Santas, and the grotesque gender simplifications of those ads collected under the heading ‘Masculine Feminine’, several speak only to singular aspects of Romanian culture. However, Jude and Ferencz-Flatz’s editorial interventions render specific references easily comprehensible. One needs no special knowledge of the national economy to interpret the cut between a woman promising to put her earnings back in the “Romanian Investment Fund” and a lit match being offered to a fireplace full of cash.  

The film is at its smartest when dissecting the conventions and aesthetics of TV advertising, in the style of a video-essay. ‘Magique Mirage’ lingers on the fantastical touches – fairy dust or lightning bolts – that admakers used to enhance the allure of their products, despite necessarily slim budgets. ‘The Anatomy of Consumption’ is a mostly silent rundown of the physical gestures frequently found in commercials: the popping of a sweet between the lips, sliding and caressing hands, often with sexually suggestive intent, and most popular of all, the eyes-closed deep-inhale sniff to capture the irresistible aroma of freshly brewed coffee or folded laundry. ‘Found Poetry’ is home to eye-catching rhetorical devices, straight from the desk of Romania’s most inspired copywriters: alliteration, rhymes, the promise of a beer as invigorating as the nation’s history, and the intriguing claim that “Danke [paint] turns you into a German”. Full marks to the confident author of ‘Bilal – a normal soap’, a slogan that perhaps sounds more fanciful in the original Romanian – but then again perhaps it doesn’t. 

Such exercises in media studies qualify the film as light edutainment. These ads, like the often-obsolete products they peddle, only scratch the surface of life in Romania at its most “intense”. They function best as either an optimistic projection of group aspiration, the Utopia of the title, or a cynically constructed holiday from reality, designed to distract the population. This film’s grim comedy, and even its horror, resides in the balance between those possibilities. The baffling vision of a middle-aged couple drowning in tripe soup takes on a grisly metaphorical cast, the threat of stains that even a new brand of washing powder cannot erase. However jovial the tone of these ads, the complex consolations of purchasing power can’t bolster a nation against life’s many growing pains and wider political turmoil. One advert asserts: “Good stuff stays good through the bad times”. Sometimes though, the stuff is accompanied by nonsense.