'Mouth' tells a grim and garbled tale of despair

Friday, October 17, 2003

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

"You will die!" hisses a cursing Gypsy woman to white-haired ex-con Dumitru (Dan Condurache). After serving 11 years for murder, he celebrates his release by taking a Gypsy gambler to the cleaners in a poker match and taking the man's wife aside for a quick tumble when the husband puts her up for one last bet.

MOVIE REVIEW

EVERY DAY GOD KISSES US ON THE MOUTH

DIRECTOR: Sinisa Dragin

CAST: Dan Condurache

RUNNING TIME: 93 minutes

LANGUAGE: Romanian with English subtitles

RATING: No rating, features some violence and animals being butchered

WHERE: Grand Illusion

GRADE: C+

But her curse doesn't spell his death, at least not in the terms we traditionally understand it. His flesh survives but his soul is put through the torments of Job. Everybody he cares for dies, some of them by his own hand, and he's left to stew in his misery, tramping across the gray Romanian countryside with a dark cloud over his hangdog face and weary eyes and a goose tucked under his arm.

In other words, it's your basic surreal portrait of the absurdity of existence from post-Communist Eastern Europe.

The second film in the Grand Illusion's only partly cheeky "International Serial Killers" series doesn't really fit the definition, though the body count (most of which occurs offscreen) almost qualifies it.

Dumitru, a butcher by trade and a drinking, gambling, whoring slob by temperament, is less a hardened killer than a rural peasant ruled by crippling rules of honor and machismo and powered by a rage and self-loathing. He takes no pleasure in killing. He doesn't seem to feel anything, at least not after the brutal revenge the Gypsy woman takes on his pregnant wife.

If God has a plan for him, as Dumitru comes to believe as the bodies mount up, it's as obscure as the film's message of despair. Dragin has more compassion for his killer than for Dumitru's victims, as if he was the plaything of capricious gods. For all the beautiful bleakness and stark, dark, gloomy black-and-white photography, it's hard to accept a sad-eyed repeat murderer as the ultimate victim of his poisonous society.