“Respecting the proportions, this movie meant, for the history of Romanian cinema, about what Andrei Tarkovski’s”Ivan’s Childhood”meant, seven or eight years ago, for the history of Russian cinema. Based on a screenplay by D.R. Popescu, the film brings to the forefront the story of a child, Michael (played by Mihai Filip), confronted with the harsh, often tragic realities of war. Ultimately, the movie is a poem of a childhood sacrificed because of the war, a poem of a childhood sacrificed because of the war, told in expressive images (thanks to cinematographer Dinu Tănase), with the help of top actors such as Mircea Albulescu (The mustachioed soldier), Ernest Maftei (the grizzled soldier), Gheorghe Cozorici (the lieutenant), Jean Constantin (the young man), Gheorghe Dinică (the veteran platoon leader), Ștefan Radof (the cook), Dan Nuțu (the dark-haired man), Ileana Popovici (the schoolteacher), Ovidiu Schumacher (the cheerful soldier), Liviu Rozorea (the Neamțul), Nicolae Wolcz (the clown).“

“Too Small’ is a kind of road movie, a movie concerned with the accumulation of energy that results from the crossing of human beings from one space to another, from one conjuncture to another. Let the story, in its most basic sense, be composed and experienced; not delivered in a smooth wrapper.”

“The difference between child and adult in the context of war is a thin one. The privilege of being the youngest of the “gang” brings him a special status, but it also brings him into the direct proximity of death, from which he escapes most often on the edge. His membership is ephemeral and, despite giving him a shell-identity, does not support the creation of his own identity. In other words, the coming-of-age is not fulfilled, because the boy’s odyssey seems like it could go on forever. As long as he lives, death will be all around him.”

“Gabrea makes use of inserts from archival footage from the front to augment the fictional frame, but also of stylistic fractures through which he breaks the convention of the movie at times. At certain moments, for example, the camera switches to a fisheye lens, which in combination with the shaky hand-held footage, makes the shots uncannily subjectivized and gives them a starkly strange dimension. Or, as in the moments of the death of the two soldiers played by Albulescu and Nuțu, we have shifts to sequences that illustrate the child’s fantasy, happy endings projected in his mind: in the first, Albulescu’s soldier returns from the front with his chest strewn with medals, waving to an ecstatic crowd. In the second, Nuțu’s character, dressed in costume, walks along a parked train, from which brides, including his fiancée, get off one by one.”