When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism

One week exclusive run

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. Cinema Guild release.

New York Film Festival 2013

“With the dry wit of his shrewdly repressed long takes, Porumboiu puts dialectic front and center and speculates on the artistic implications of digital technology, even as he turns to medical imaging for some outrageously moist comedy.” —Richard Brody, New Yorker

“An enjoyably unforced and absurd slice of life.” —Nick McCarthy, Slant Magazine

“The most original voice in the new Romanian cinema.” —LA Times