Anca Damian's previous feature, Crulic, was a great film. It was a moving, beautiful take on a tragic true story and it was a truly original mix of documentary elements and gorgeous animation. How she could have directed a film as silly and all-over-the place as O vară foarte instabilă/A Very Unsettled Summer, I can't understand. The film is currently running at Cinema Union, 21  Ion Câmpineanu Street (on Wednesdays at 6 pm) and is aired on HBO on Wednesday (1.45 am) and Friday (8.20 pm) so if you feel like an easy, sexy feature involving Bucharest, English accents, and questions of life and fiction, you should give it a shot. It's not hard to watch thanks to the attractive cast and the setting but expect no complexities or narrative logic.

Based on a short story by Irish, Bucharest-based author Philip Ó Ceallaigh, who also co-wrote the script with Damian, A Very Unsettled Summer plays against a, well, hot and stormy Bucharest summer. Its characters are Daniel, a Scotsman living in Bucharest, his current architect girlfriend (and apparent true love) Irina, his feisty ex-girlfriend Maria, and Danish author Alex, in whom both Maria and Daniel confess and who is actually the deus-ex-machina in this erotic triangle.

Still hurt after Daniel left her, Maria sends him stories in which she entices him to have sex one last time while Alex is more than happy to get involved in the new game. His erotically unhinged meetings with Maria are intercut with the sunny, calm moments with his current lover Irina, and it's not long before Alex is torn between the two aspects of his romantic life and endangers his new-found happiness. But as it seems, the entire story is actually controlled by Alex, who is also writing his version of the relationships between Alex, Maria, and Irina.

The metafictional aspect is taken to a confusing level and soon enough, the whole literary, is-it-fictional-is-it-not, aspect gets tiresome and clichéed. Using literature and metafictional devices takes more skill and Damian's film is neither The French Lieutenant's Woman nor Stranger than Fiction. What's worse, Damian can't help it and opts for even more artifices, inserting a few animated scenes, probably in an attempt to make the movie even more 'post-modern'.

The actors do their best but are given little room to shine in a film which titillates rather than draw interesting figures (the female characters are mostly there to have unhinged sex with Daniel, or simply be naked in his apparently irresistible presence) and this is a crying shame because Jamie Sives (Daniel) is a good actor whom I have enjoyed a lot in Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself or in Damian's Crulic (he was the narrator), Kim Bodnia (Alex) starred in Danish classics such as Pusher or In China They Eat Dogs and Ana Ularu (Maria) is one of the most interesting young Romanian actresses. Not only would they have deserved better, but also Bucharest, and definitely the audience.

By Ioan Moldovan, ioana.moldovan@romania-insider.com

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