Self-Portrait of a Dutiful Daughter

What can a former dutiful daughter do of her days, when she is a Romanian woman in her thirties from a good family whose life will never resemble that of Simone de Beauvoir? Cristiana talks about everything and nothing with her friends and lugs around her doctoral thesis in engineering, which is not moving forward as she would like it to. She maintains a sexual yet hardly satisfying relationship with a married man and she might, why not, adopt a dog—something she has always dreamed of doing. Under the seeming banality of the conversations that give structure to this second feature by Ana Lungu (who studied under Cristi Puiu) an existential poetry and an absurd form of humour arise. They remind us that experience is not necessarily something that we acquire, but rather something that falls apart and crumbles away day after day.
(Mathieu Macheret)