When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism

Closing Night! Director Corneliu Porumboiu in person for Q&A!

This rigorously structured new film from Corneliu Porumboiu (Police Adjective) takes an interestingly oblique look at filmmaking. We don’t see the process itself, but a succession of exchanges that take place when the camera isn’t rolling: dinners after work between the director-protagonist Paul (Bogdan Dumitrache) and his actress (and momentary girlfriend) Alina (Diana Avramut), a rehearsal, an exchange between Paul and his tough producer Magda (Mihaela Sirbu), a car ride through Bucharest at night. Every scene is covered in one meticulously executed take. Porumboiu’s approach, which the filmmaker himself has likened to that of Hong Sang-soo, allows us to concentrate on the rhythms of the everyday – silences, pauses, hesitations; the anodyne discomfort of making conversation; the strangeness of so many temporary relationships between exhausted, edgy individuals. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (the title will make sense at the end) is so precisely composed that its very construction has a crystalline beauty.