SYNOPSICS
Calatoria lui Gruber (2008) is a German,Italian,Romanian movie. Radu Gabrea has directed this movie. Florin Piersic Jr.,Marcel Iures,Udo Schenk,Claudiu Bleont are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2008. Calatoria lui Gruber (2008) is considered one of the best Drama movie in India and around the world.
On 22 June 1941, Germany and Romania attack Soviet Russia. Several days later, Curzio Malaparte, the Italian writer who would one day pen the novel « Kaputt », a war correspondent for « Corriere de la Sera », arrives in Iasi, in the north of Moldova, on his way to the front, which is nearby. He is incapacitated by a severe allergy and his only chance of recovery is to find a Jewish doctor, an allergologist who had studied in Florence, called Josef Gruber. All his attempts to find him are unsuccessful. While looking for him, Curzio discovers that in Iasi, several days prior to his arrival, a violent anti-Semitic pogrom took place and that a large number of the Jewish citizens of Iasi were deported by train and that Dr Gruber may be among them. In order to find him, Curzio, aided by Guido Sartori, the Italian consul in Iasi, tries to obtain an official warrant to bring Josef Gruber back. He confronts indifference, rudeness and the desire by the Romanian authorities to hide something ...
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Calatoria lui Gruber (2008) Reviews
Outstanding!
To say the least, a necessary picture. Furthermore, a very subtle point of view, and an interesting, original approach to such an equally difficult and terrifying subject. Well-paced, intelligent, and immensely telling on the subject of the delicate balance between the forces at play in the historical moment in point. A wealth of information delivered subtly gives the film body and weight. Great performances from most artists with a - by now - expected yet amazing power of transformation from Claudiu Bleont, this very versatile actor. Good debut for Mr. Piersic Jr in a star role, and a nice guest appearance from Mr. Iures. Needless to say I am sad that the film's reception so far in its native country looks cooler than should be. I hope it will win in the international festivals circuit the respect and exposure it deserves.
Holocaust Black Comedy serves as corrective to lies of Holocaust 'Minimizers'
There appear to be a few posters here in major denial regarding Romanian culpability vis-a-vis the Holocaust. One poster on IMDb goes so far as to say that the persecution of the Jews in Romania was by and large a series of "isolated" incidents. In regards to the Iasi pogrom (which is addressed in "Gruber's Journey), he writes: "In June, 1941, in Iasi, the German army rounded up and deported a number of Jews, following their acts of antifascist resistance and sabotage. The real numbers seem to be somewhere between 500 and 2000". The actual number of Jews killed during Iasi pogrom was put at 13,266 by the Romanian Special Intelligence Service (SSI); the Jewish community statistics listed 14,850 killed. This was all documented by The Wiesel Commission, the common name given to the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, which was established by former President Ion Iliescu in October 2003 to research and create a report on the actual history of the Holocaust in Romania. According to Wikipedia, "The Commission was led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel; the report was released in late 2004. The Romanian government recognized the report's findings and acknowledged the deliberate participation in the Holocaust by the World War II Romanian regime led by Ion Antonescu. The report assessed that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered or died under the supervision and as a result of the deliberate policies of Romanian civilian and military authorities. The Wiesel Commission report also documented pervasive anti-Semitism and violence against Jews in Romania before World War II, when Romania's Jewish population was among the largest in Europe." The Wiesel Commission's report can be found at yad-vashem.org. Gruber's Journey represents a corrective to those Holocaust deniers and minimizers who seek to minimize the role of Romanian participation in the Holocaust. The film's focus is really on Curzio Malaparte, an Italian journalist who was a press attaché in the Wehrmacht during World War II. We learn that Malaparte, who suffers from debilitating allergies, was earlier referred to a Jewish doctor, an allergist named Josef Gruber, who has disappeared after many Jews have been rounded up in Iasi and transported to parts unknown in packed cattle cars. Malaparte must find Gruber who he believes can help him overcome his allergies so he can basically function on the job. The story picks up with Malaparte headed for the front accompanied by Colonel Freitag, a high-ranking German officer. Malaparte has a severe allergy attack on the train and they stop off in a local town where he's greeted by the head of the Italian Consulate inside an extremely dusty building where his allergies only seem to get worse (both the Italian Consul and German officer are presented sympathetically as they try to help the ailing Malaparte). At one point, Malaparte is so incapacitated that he remains in his hotel room during an air raid attack. Finally, Malaparte receives information that a Josef Gruber has been deported with other Jews from Iasi. Malaparte then goes on his own journey attempting to navigate through the bureaucracy of the Romanian Police and Army attempting to find exactly where Gruber has been taken. The film's director, Radu Gabrea, does not whitewash Romanian responsibility for the various pogroms committed against the Jews. While the occupying German force supported their actions, Gabrea makes it quite clear that it was both the Romanian Police and Army along with the local populace (and not the Wehrmacht) who organized and carried out the widespread killings of Jews in Romania. Unlike Roberto Benigni, who unsuccessfully attempted to mix comedy and pathos during his Holocaust themed-film, 'Life is Beautiful', Director Gabrea is on much more solid ground in his examination of the Holocaust from a comic point of view. "Gruber's Journey' is not only a 'black comedy' but a wonderful illustration of the phrase coined by Hannah Arendt, 'The Banality of Evil'. Malaparte is tossed to-and-fro between one bureaucrat and another as they stymie him in his quest to find out Gruber's fate. Chief among these petty tyrants who put obstacles in Malaparte's path at every turn is Stavarache, the head of the Secret Police and Colonel Niculescu-Coca, the local Army Garrison Commander. It's laughable (but at the same time horribly tragic) that these bumbling 'men of authority' have the fate of thousands of human beings in their hands. Orders are carried out on the pretext that Jewish 'terrorists' and 'provocateurs' are responsible for all the 'disturbances' (most based on rumors or falsely created incidents by local terror squads) which the authorities must address. The 'men at the top' very much indulge themselves by wielding almost unlimited power (checked only when the Germans override them) but descend into petty bickering as they desperately attempt to protect their own turf. Gabrea intentionally only hints at the pervasive violence all around. When Malaparte enters the police station, locals are wiping off blood from the front walls of the station—evidence of a massacre occurring the night before. And when Malaparte finally discovers the doomed cattle cars, we only hear the screams of the trapped Jews inside—Gabrea resists showing us a scene (which actually occurred) where Malaparte opens one of the train doors and bodies fall out. It's this mixture of detachment and obliviousness coupled with sadism and petty narcissism amongst the populace which is being held up by Gabrea in high relief. Somewhere along the line, we could have learned a little bit more about Malaparte's character. We do learn from the final credits that Malaparte wrote a widely-read book after the War which condemned the atrocities committed by both the Germans and Romanians. He also became a Communist. The performances are uniformly excellent including Florin Piersic Jr's Malaparte—despite the fact that his German and Italian were dubbed (amazingly, you will not notice this!). See Gruber's Journey and read the Wiesel Commission's report!
Total disappointment
I had thought that Romanian movies departed at last this old-style lack of luster and wits, now with the New Wave and all that, but unfortunately here i see there are still some old dinosaurs who can't be able to understand they should give up. This "Trip of Gruber" thing is wrong from head to tail. The script is amorphous and linear, the characters totally shallow, with no depth at all. Poor Florinel Piersic, an actor with a certain talent and a load of experience, after so many roles in movies and theater, fails lamentably, being inexpressive, false, completely unconvincing (now of course the part is also badly written, with not one bit of inner dynamics). Razvan Vasilescu is nice enough, but this is hardly surprising: as the awkward director didn't know hot to ask him to play, he simply repeats for the tenth time his skillful tricks from Nemescu and Pintilie. Marcel Iures also - not surprising at all, he is a natural; but the role is sorely amiss. It should have closed the movie by making a really strong point, and instead it's conventional and teary. Bindea play-acts falsely the so-called "Italian" consul, in the most Romanian way possible. Claudiu Bleontz is really the best, the only one worth watching - but only if you didn't see his previous parts that he played in the same style. Further, the direction is dull, static, childish. Nothing of the tension, suspense, dramatism of such a genocide, that barely happened a couple of days ago. It has no depth, no resonance. I think even Sergiu Nicolaescu could have done it a bit smarter and faster paced - if not more artsy. The sets and costumes are awfully conventional, not convincing at all. Of course, as so many people remarked, the movie is offensive against Romanian people, trying to accuse them of crimes they never committed. The pogrom of Iassy was the German's work, in full and all. Romanian army was not involved, and the civilians furtively did their best to help the poor victims. But now it's fashionable to accuse everybody of holocaust complicity, so this piece of historical mystification came into being. I must state that I'm a Hungarian living in Romania, and I really care to our Romanian hosts and brothers. It's infamous to take such xenophobic and racist attitudes, and be a hate monger between Romanian and Magyar, Jews, Gypsies and other ethnic minorities.
allergies in times of war
In director Radu Gabrea's Gruber's Journey the Romanian cinema gets it's first film seriously approaching the painful theme of the episodes of the Holocaust that took place in Romania between 1940 when the dictator Ion Antonescu took power (in collaboration for the first four and a half months of his regime with the extreme nationalistic Iron Guard movement) until August 1944 when the king deposed Antonescu and made Romania join the Allied for the last period of the war. One of the bloodiest episodes of this period was the pogrom and massacre of more than 13,000 Jews in the Eastern Romania town of Iasi (Yashi, Jassy) in the first days of the war. For many years the Romanian history books ignored or minimized the events, but the truth became more and more evident in the last ten years, despite efforts of Holocaust deniers who still try to hide the responsibility of the Romanian authorities of those times. A veteran of Romania cinema, Radu Gabrea is not at his first film dealing with sensitive events in the Romanian history. In The Beheaded Rooster (Cocosul decapitat) he described the same period but looked at the events from the perspective of the German population in Romania, part of which collaborated with the Nazis. I did not like that movie but appreciated the courage in dealing with the subject. In Gruber's Journey Gabrea relies on very solid premises, using the memories of the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte who as a war correspondent visited the city soon after the events and mentioned them in his novel Kapput. The story in the film describes Malaparte's arrival in the city in the first days after Romania entered the war as an ally of Nazi Germany, in June 1941. The war has started, but what bothers Malaparte is a terrible allergy that can be cured by a specialist residing in Iasi. That doctor is not easy to find however, chaos reigns, people cannot be found where they are supposed to be, the Balkan mentality of corruption and disorder seems to be only amplified by the war, and above all the doctor happens to be a Jew. Something terrible seems to have happened to the Jews in this city, but nobody speaks open about this or when they do double-speak hides the facts, the army and the police throw responsibility one on the other. The military commander of the region will be suspended, but not for the loss of the lives of the Jews (he actually is congratulated by dictator Antonescu for the efficient handling of the events) but for allowing its soldiers to rampage through the domain of a count and destroy his wine cellar. The film which starts in a comical register where the innocent Italian writer meets the eternal Romania of playwright Caragiale's heroes, turns into a dramatic confrontation with the horrors of crimes of war. The team of actors does an excellent job, starting with Florin Piersic Jr. as Malaparte despite the fact that he is or looks just too young for the role, Malaparte was 42 by the time of the events described in the film. Marcel Iures has a short but memorable presence on screen as Gruber, while Claudiu Bleont and Razvan Vasilescu play the chiefs of the army and of the local prosecution office in the greatest and best tradition of Caragiale. While the international breakthrough of the Romanian cinema was due mainly to films describing the period of 'transition' after the fall of the Communism, the re-evaluation of the past was never out of the interest of Romanian film makers. The exception was the Holocaust period, and this is the first good and courageous film on this subject. Hopefully other will follow.
Obsolete, boring, and falsifying history
First and foremost, one thing should be clear: although an Ally to Germany during World War Two, Romania kept an all-over friendly and protecting stance towards Jewish people. The only over-nationalist excesses belonged to the unavoidable antisemitic extremists, to be found (unfortunately) in virtually any European (and not only) country. As such, the Romanian citizens and authorities generally cared to our Jewish co-nationals, and did their best to protect them against any abuses. The isolated cases of persecution and murder were by no means enough to label us as antisemitic or accomplices to the Nazi genocide (or, rather, "holocaust", as it's politically correct to call it lately). Still, to certain international circles, such a stance isn't by far good enough, and in the last 10-20 years, they endeavored to culpabilise Romania of an illusory holocaust-participation. It's this political strategy that governs the present cinematographic attempt. In June, 1941, in Iasi, the German army rounded and deported a number of Jews, following their acts of antifascist resistance and sabotage. The real numbers seem to be somewhere between 500 and 2000. Close to 100 were executed in the police prefecture yard, while others were loaded into trains to be deported, as such many more dying of thirst and suffocation, until Romanian authorities intervened to set them free. This was the infamous "Iasi Pogrome". Radu Gabrea's movie turns history upside down, throwing ALL THE GUILT in the Romanians' task, and shamelessly exonerating the Germans of any crime. Fortunately, this piece of treason and manipulation won't be long lived, because the production is slow-paced, lagging and very awkward. Except Claudiu Bleontz, excellent as usual, plus Marcel Iures and Razvan Vasilescu (in two cameos), very good too, all the others play woodenly and false. It's over-long and boring - same as the communist historic movies of the Eighties. R.I.P. "Gruber's Travel", and keep in mind: Romanians have always been a kind and tolerant people, and trying to turn them into genocide criminals is a serious offense, that should be brought to court and severely punished by the law!