The black-and-white film evokes classic Westerns, with rugged landscapes and a story of a lawman bringing an outlaw to justice.
Midway through Aferim!, a character appears for the first and last time, and what he says is unsettling. The location is a rural marketplace in the Wallachia region of Romania, and the year is 1835. In that busy commercial setting, this desperate Roma man asks market-goers to buy his family as slaves. “Save us from hunger,” he pleads.
That sums up the horrific human rights calamity at the center of this striking film: In Romania, Roma lived in slavery until the 1850s. I didn’t know this, and I gather that in Romania, it’s a painful topic that hasn’t been talked about very much. Last year, the film’s director and co-writer, Radu Jude, told The New York Times that in his country, the matter is “only really discussed by close circles of historians and Roma activists.” Aferim! is, he said, only the second Romanian film to address Roma slavery, and it has sparked a discussion.
Aferim! evokes classic Westerns with its rugged landscapes and stark, black-and-white cinematography. There are almost no close-ups, and we frequently hear dialogue well before we see the actors, who have a way of emerging into the frame from far off in the distance. The story, too, could come from a Western: A lawman is charged with bringing an outlaw to justice.
Despite the depressing Romanian history that informs it, Aferim! might not immediately register as a social-issue movie. The tone is often light, the dialogue hearty and bawdy. The focus is Constandin (Teodor Corban), a constable who has been tasked by a wealthy landowner (Alexandru Dabija) with hunting down a runaway slave (Cuzinn Toma). Constandin is joined on his picaresque journey by his teenage son (Mihai Comanoiu), whom Constandin promises a better life in the army.
Structurally the film recalls The Last Detail, and it also reminds me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, as its heroes travel around a basically premodern land and have a series of strange encounters. In Aferim!, though, the episodes depict a series of injustices, one after another. The father and son are accosted by another constable, who extorts them. One priest they meet is a slaveholder, another an appalling bigot. A woman tells of being beaten by her husband. A landowner punishes a slave in a scene of hideous violence.
And although Constandin is frequently jolly, he is not a particularly nice man. He kidnaps a Roma child and sells him as a slave. He jerks a Roma woman around by her hair as he interrogates her. He boasts to his son of his philandering (“Don’t tell your mother,” he cautions). Even so, Constandin has his compassionate moments, and we learn that he also faces constraints. This is a remarkable performance by Corban. He almost never stops talking, and much of what he says is aphorisms. I wrote this one down: “In the ass of the humble the devil sits cross-legged.” I’m not sure what it means, but it lingers with me.
