Americans at Large.(Taken)(Movie review)

On August 25, 2006, a Romanian named Cristian Nemescu was killed in a car crash at the age of twenty-seven. He was returning from an editing suite, where he had been working on a cut of "California Dreamin'." This was Nemescu's first feature as a director, and we will never know exactly how the finished film would have looked; the regret, though deep, is not all-consuming, because "California Dreamin' " bears almost no trace of the tyro. It could use a trim, but only rarely does it strain for effect, and, for a young man, Nemescu was uncannily versed in the emotions of middle age--free-floating rancor, the creak of unhelpful wisdom, and a covetous sigh at the spectacle of lust. If it's regret you want, don't mourn the director; just watch his movie.

The year is 1999, during the conflict in Kosovo, and the place is Constanta, Romania, on the Black Sea. A platoon of American marines has arrived with a shipment of military radar, to be deployed near the Serbian border in support of air raids by the NATO coalition. The plan is to put the equipment on a train and escort it across Romania: hardly an errand to perplex the guy in charge, Captain Jones (Armand Assante). That's what he thinks. On a sleepy summer's day, the train grinds into a railroad station in the village of Capalnita, at the back end of nowhere, to be met by the devil incarnate. His name is Doiaru (Razvan Vasilescu), he is the stationmaster, and, like all the best Beelzebubs, he doesn't look the part. With his lined and grizzled face, poised to crease into a smile, he could be the gentlest of patriarchs; but the man is a beast, who has built up a black market, terrorized the other villagers, and brought a nearby factory to its knees. He loves his daughter Monica (Maria Dinulescu), a sullen beauty of seventeen, but his love--or, as she sees it, his dread of being alone--vents itself as a fearsome wish to control. No wonder she longs to cut loose.

And here comes her chance: a herd of American boys, as dazed and horny as bullocks in the wrong pasture. They expect a brief halt, instead of which they linger for five days and browse among the locals. This is because Doiaru uncouples the engine and demands customs documentation, which nobody seems able to provide. Single-handed, in other words, he blocks the progress of American might, and why? A succession of haunting flashbacks to his own boyhood, in the Second World War, when he waited for Allied help that never came, suggests a possible cause, but Vasilescu's earthy performance tells of something more stubbornly rooted: a force of ill will, which cannot abide the good will of others. The irony is that, in stopping the train, he sets off a burst of everything he loathes: friendship, zeal, and the fireworks of desire. The mayor of Capalnita, spotting a chance to put his little kingdom on the map, invites the troops to a barbecue party, where he wears a Stars and Stripes tie. We even get an Elvis impersonator, crooning "Love Me Tender" in a Romanian burr. There is nothing new, of course, in the comedy of the backwater that gets swamped by the mainstream, or by a gush of good fortune, but even films as winning as "Whisky Galore!" or "Local Hero" didn't dare to propose that the backwater itself might be corrupted and crazed with boredom, whereas one father in Capalnita tells his son to flee to Bucharest and threatens to break his legs if he ever comes back. When Captain Jones takes the stage at a village meeting, at the mayor's request, he describes the place as paradise. The elders applaud, but you know what their juniors would say.

So busily, and wittily, does Nemescu show these characters striking their various political attitudes (there is a hapless intrusion from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) that the film has no time to get locked into an attitude of its own. What it has, instead, is an appetite for human quiddity, and an eye for those fleeting shocks in which cultures strike and rebound. To this extent, it is Monica, not her father, who is at the movie's heart; having conceived a passion for Jones's handsome deputy, Sergeant McLaren (Jamie Elman), she gets an English-speaking classmate--who happens to adore her--to interpret the bashful endearments that she and the sergeant wish to trade. The result is a masterly, international update of the Cyrano situation. ("I would like to kiss you" is translated as "He wants to know what kind of music you listen to.") On the one hand, Monica is impetuous to the point of brusque; when that kiss comes, his lips draw near for a tentative peck, and she practically jumps down his throat. On the other hand, taking a cue from ...