Film: The Happiest Girl In The World
Release date: 30th August 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 100 mins
Director: Radu Jude
Starring: Andreea Bosneag, Andi Vasluianu, Doru Catanescu, Alexandru Georgescu, Diana Gheorghian
Genre: Comedy/Drama
Studio: Soda
Format: DVD
Country: Romania
At just thirty three years of age, Radu Jude already has an impressive CV, with many awards to his name. The Happiest Girl In The World, a family drama cum satire about Romania’s shift from communism to capitalism, mark’s his feature length debut.
The Happiest Girl In The World focuses on Delia Fratalia (Andreea Bosneag), a teenager from a poor family, who has won a car by sending in the labels from a soft drink, and must travel to Bucharest, along with her mother and father, to collect her prize.
Before she can claim her prize, she must first take part in a commercial for the soft drink, sitting in her new car and proclaiming to be “the happiest girl in the world.” However, as filming drags on, and the film crew argue with the sponsors for creative control of the picture, we learn that Delia is far from happy, as she argues with her parents over what to do with the car. They intend to sell it in order to finance a guest house that they can rent out to pay for her university education, and she intends to keep it, as she has never won anything before, or been privileged enough to have nice things.
As the day wears on, and filming becomes more complicated, the family unit gradually deteriorates, as both sides refuse to back down over their plans for the car…
The first, most glaring problem with The Happiest Girl In The World comes from its subject matter. As well as making a comment about the nature of capitalism on both a personal level, as represented by the family’s quarrel, and a corporate level, as represented by the drink’s company’s insistence on interfering with the filming, Radu Jude is attempting to demonstrate how frustrating and painstakingly boring the process of filming even a short commercial can be. The problem is that, in doing so, he has given us a film that is, for large periods of time, itself frustrating and painstakingly boring. There surely was a better way, for example, of showing us how many times the same scene must be shot in order to satisfy both the director and the marketing executives than making us witness each take. The same line of dialogue is shown countless times in order to demonstrate how long it takes both Delia and the film crew to get it right, which becomes almost unbearable after a while. It doesn’t help that, between the scenes in which the commercial is shot, we see Delia argue with her parents several times, and the dialogue in these scenes too repeats itself almost word for word each time. It can become difficult to see the progression of the story as a tremendous feeling of déjà vu begins to arise after about five minutes of the film.
It is a shame that the film is structured in this way because such tedium distracts from the things that are likeable. The crew who make the commercial are the film’s strongest point, as their mixture of on-set banter, temper tantrums and inter-relationships provides a useful insight into what it is like to work in such an industry, as well as offering an alternative, and in many ways healthier family unit against which to contrast the Fratalia family. The progression of the arguments in the Fratalia family also gets gradually more intense, as they begin with what seems like a stroppy teenager rebelling against her parents and gradually descend to the father’s denouncement of his own daughter. Throughout this relationship, Radu Jude does a good job of making both sides of the argument seem fair, serving as a social commentary, as well as a very specific family issue. Praise must also go to the cinematography, as each shot is densely layered and full of movement and activity, suggesting the hectic rate at which production must take place when capital gain is the main concern.
However, this cannot detract from the fact that the film, for the most part, struggles to maintain any serious interest. The family’s bickering only gains more levity in the last few scenes, with everything leading up to this point about as interesting as the arguments we have with our own family members on a daily basis. It could be that Radu Jude’s previous experience in short filmmaking has caused him to struggle to create a story with enough variation to justify a full length production. The very same points could have been made if The Happiest Girl In The World were, say, half an hour long, and it is difficult not to feel that it would be better for everyone concerned if this had been the case.
While The Happiest Girl In The World raises some interesting issues, there is simply not enough here to justify making an entire film out of it. Well shot and well performed it may be, but these positives do not fail to mask the central problem that it is as tedious a film as you are ever likely to see. PK
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