With several fiction features under her belt – for example, 2017’s Breaking News [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Iulia Rugină
fiche film] – Romanian director Iulia Rugină makes her documentary debut with Playback, which has just competed in the Romanian Competition at the 30th Astra Film Festival, the country’s biggest and longest-running documentary gathering. Rugină’s film centres on Sorin Lupaşcu, a DJ who used to entertain the crowds of youngsters who flocked to the seaside resort of Costineşti in the 1980s, and adds layers of meaning and information with never-before-seen footage from the era.

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Taking as its starting point the preparations for a Bucharest event from a few years ago, when a sort of communism museum, including a discothèque, was opened to youngsters to enable them to see how Romanians lived in the 1980s, the documentary shows how something that we now take for granted, music, was actually a precious and generally unavailable commodity in that decade, when the strict regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu forbade contact with what was happening culturally outside of Romania. At one point, Lupaşcu describes how he used to record mere seconds (as the signal was so bad) of new songs from foreign radio stations and how he used to play these records at the weekly dancing nights that he MCed, hoping that he would, at some point, have the opportunity to record the entire song.

Playback brings to mind another documentary from the region, Bulgarian director Borislav Kolev’s Rock’n’Roll (2019), a film that should have travelled much more widely than it did. Focusing on rock bands and singers who were famous in Bulgaria in the 1980s, an important part of Rock’n’Roll explores something that has been lost: singers who used to fascinate the crowds, and who then lose all relevance in the present day, once they have completely disappeared from the public eye – or maybe they have remained there via various compromises. This is something that Playback tries to do, too, but unfortunately, its protagonist is not likeable enough and seems to insist on living in the past: we never find out what he does now, and that probably would have fleshed out the story.

Playback compensates for this with a mix of footage from Lupaşcu’s personal archive, showing youngsters having fun at Costineşti, but also official footage from the National Television archives, where kids with expressionless faces robotically say things to the tune of: “A night out gives us the energy to diligently work tomorrow for Romania’s brighter future.” There is such a stark contrast between Lupaşcu’s footage, where young people dance relaxed and carefree (albeit a tad too self-consciously), and the official recordings, but the documentary doesn’t bother to explore this chasm.

Probably the most disappointing thing about Playback is that one might feel there was not enough material here for a feature. Scenes where the most banal things are done or said (for example, setting up a meeting for the next day) are left in, even though they don’t offer anything to the audience. At one point, while shooting in Costineşti, Lupaşcu and the film’s team are literally hijacked by the owner of a restaurant, who insists he should be included in the story. It’s hard to fathom why he was left in the final cut, but all of these shortcomings make Playback feel less like a celebratory exploration of long-lost fame, and more like a missed opportunity.

Playback was produced by Romania's Parada Film.