ADFF 2011 Review: Best Intentions

Making a very personal film is always walking a very fine line in terms of art and self-indulgence. The Romanian film ‘Best Intentions’ by Adrian Sitaru is based on an extremely personal story of the director himself, and while it has inventive camera moves and some great moments, the story itself doesn’t justify the runtime and would have been much more effective as a short film.

The film follows Alex , a man in his mid-30′s that’s stuck-up and never really happy whether its with his girlfriend or with life in general. After getting a phone call from his father that his mother is ill and admitted to a hospital, he makes a trip to Bucharest to visit the hospital. As the film goes on, he has problems trusting the condition of the hospital as well as the staff as he talks around with various characters about whether he should transfer her to a better hospital or not.

There’s a very inventive camera technique that the director applies here that sometimes make the substandard story interesting. Almost the entire film has been shot through someone’s point of view, with the characters looking at the camera at times as if they are looking into someone’s eyes. The point of view shifts from scene to scene, from main characters to supporting characters to just random characters in the scene’s background. This, coupled with some very long takes, makes for some interesting viewing at least visually.

But the problem here is that the story doesn’t warrant a feature film in itself. It’s extremely uneventful and filled with meandering dialogue sequences that don’t move the film forward at all. It’s as if the director just decided to recreate his real life experience into film, and as we all know real life isn’t nearly as interesting and especially not when the event itself doesn’t have much drama going on. The film breezes through without any dramatic twists or turns and by the time it reaches the end, it fails to hook the viewer along with it.

Even the pay-off of the film isn’t something that compensates for the lack of movement throughout the film, and it ends just like such a real-life event would and the movie ends on an even more ambiguous note. Sitaru really should have made some changes to the script to make the real life event more cinematically interesting, and I believe the film doesn’t have much life outside festival screenings like this one due to a very narrow appeal to arthouse audiences only.

Other than that, there’s a few good scenes to be seen here including a few quirky characters like a lady with the rabbit mask that adds a darkly humorous element to the film and some exchanges with the doctor that are well written. The acting is effective and works through even in some very long takes.

‘Best Intentions’ has a story to tell, but chooses the wrong format to do so. As a twenty minute short, this would have been quality stuff. But as a hundred minute feature, it plods along without much activity and ends up being only above average fare.

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