Romanian film review – Hot and Heated: A Summer List

Warm and stormy. That would describe this summer so far. Here are some of my faves for the capricious season, films set in summer and/or with a summery air: dusty, sweaty, erotic, romantic, chaotic, melancholic, dangerous. All of it.

My most recent (unexpected) highlight is Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy. The master of the spaghetti western, a term coined to describe westerns produced in Europe, made three films about a lone gunman (played by Clint Eastwood) set in the American Wild West . The gloriously entertaining The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) is the most famous one. To my shame it was the only one I'd watched. Now I finally caught up and I am impressed. The first is A Fistful of Dollars(1964), a nasty, concise and laconic tale of Eastwood’s character playing two rival families against each other, followed by my favourite, For a Few Dollars More(1965), an elegant, languid meeting of two bounty hunters (Eastwood teams up with the sharpest combo of gaze and cheekbones in cinema, the formidable Lee Van Cleef). The trilogy has just been aired on public broadcaster TVR1 and TVR2 and looks like there will be some reruns.

In Cluj you can catch one of the greatest of French and world arthouse cinema, Éric Rohmer. Known for his intellectual, witty, talky films, he is most famous for a series of films dealing with the question of attraction, Six Moral Tales. The Collector/ La Collectionneuse (1967) is the delightful story about a young woman ‘collecting’ lovers while vacationing in the south of France and of two older men who want to make sure her morals do not degrade too much. The pic is shown at cinema Victoria as part of an homage to the director, who also made a series of four films on the trials and tribulations of love, each set in a different season and area of France. A Tale of Summer is wonderful; keep an eye on the programme in case it pops up, but you’d be fine with any Rohmer title they show.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961) needs no introduction, and while the film is a sappier, happy-ending fairytale version of Truman Capote’s eponymous novella, it is such a charmer. It’s set in New York, or more precisely in the New York apartment of lovingly eccentric Holly Golightly, who profits financially from a collection of wealthy gentleman friends, and is geting close to her upstairs neighbour, a loyal, down-to-earth writer. I don’t want to spoil it for those (very few) who don’t know it, but let's say it's no wonder Audrey Hepburn became a stratospheric star after this one. Screening in Bucharest this week.