TO KILL A BIRD OF PREY

“A story (a policier, as one presenter tried to define it — as opposed to crime film, as if the French-sounding neologism defines a different artistic genre!) — with pursued and pursuers, fits into a genre with strict rules. No matter how you guide the narrative, when it starts from the premise of a crime and follows the uncovering of those who committed it, the conditions and extent of the acts, gathering of evidence and identification of culprits, the storyteller is obligated to play the game within the boundaries of the genre: that is, to resolve the situations (with talent helping make this more spectacular, captivating, and convincing) and ultimately to provide satisfaction to the viewer, whose moral instinct and legitimate curiosity as a spectator demand that wrongdoings be punished. That is the happy ending in crime films — or genre films, if we prefer to avoid the label.”

“It’s true that instead of an action told in a captivating and spectacular manner, the filmmaker seems to have preferred the exercise of sketching a few portraits.”

“A crime film? No, because the intention seems to be to transgress and shatter all the rules of the genre. Not a crime film, but an anti-crime film — not within the boundaries of the genre, but against them. Fine, but this act of dismantling doesn’t lead to a new genre, only to the chaotic disintegration of an already established universe. If you don’t want to work within a genre, why not choose another? Or, if you want to create a new one, then the genre you’re trying to establish must be definable, and the story told in this new manner must be followable, understandable.”

“A constant in Demian’s entire body of work is this tendency to construct communities that — no matter how schematic or unpromising the script might seem at first glance (as is also the case with the two texts written by Sălcudeanu) — ultimately relativize and blur the notion of a so-called ‘single truth’ and, especially, of a so-called ‘reality.”

“For director Iosif Demian, people — with all their paradoxes and idiosyncrasies — matter more than the functions they serve within the economy of cinematic convention. Although his stylistic partisanship is always coherent, pronounced, and on display in his films, the characters push against the inherent limitations of clearly structured constructions, waging continuous battles between spontaneity/unpredictability and articulation/premeditation.”

I won’t rush, not until I get the chance to see it projected in a proper cinema, to firmly and unequivocally declare that To Kill a Bird of Prey is one of the most iconoclastic and unclassifiable Romanian films I’ve seen so far. But I’m almost certain of it.”