“‘Test Paper’ commits the imprudence of shifting the center of the action from the teenagers, on their teachers, in a confrontation of ars-pedagogica and comic-melodramatic pontifices”

“The movie marks the debut of a veritable sociological phenomenon of the ’80s, which offered the younger generation the illusion of an alternative to the conformism of the cinema of the time, welcome in the mold of school uniform. Corjos and Gh. Șovu, the screenwriter of the movie, put two good-natured and beautiful young people in front of the baccalaureate to face, in love, the world of teachers and parents who believe that for love ‘it’s not the time!'”

“The authors of the comedy confront archetypes such as the class valedictorian, the girl of modest origin in competition with the ready-money, meddlesome, fire-breathing kid, the ideal teacher with his head in the clouds or the dry and exact little girl like the sciences he teaches, in a comical-melodrama steeped in sentimentality, but also with an honest attempt to tackle the mentality of the last years of high school.”

If there’s anything that can be taught to children by watching this movie, it would be about how the stilted language of a political era can become the language of the state, so deeply screwed into people’s minds that it is still spoken today, about how censorship excavates natural emotions and amputates natural gestures of closeness, about how, in an autocratic regime, two sentimental partners seem more awkward than the stuffed foxes in the dioramas of the Antipa Museum, work companions instead of lovers, and last but not least about how repressed people become mannequins in a territory ruled by a mouthpiece.

“It is interesting that all these harmful effects of the dictatorship are not seen directly in the movie, but through a gestalt mechanism – after you cut out the geometric body you can still identify it by the outline left. I am thinking that perhaps many of those involved in the ideal raised by “The Graduates” totally believed in it and identified with it, despite the fact that the corresponding years in reality were downright Orwellian in Romania. Perhaps therein lies the unnatural and superficial beauty of the movie, the fact that it has such an overdose of candor that it can absorb all the genuine miseries of life.”