The Japanese Dog (Tudor Christian Jurgiu, 2013): Romania

Reviewed by Simon Rosen. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2014

This is by far one of the weirdest and at the same time one of the most interesting films I’ve seen on the festival.

Tudor Christian Jurgiu first feature that is about an old man called Costache Moldu (Rebengiuc) that has recently lost his home and wife in a recent flood. He is allocated in a house by the government, there he tries to rebuild his old life from start. His son Ticu (Serban Pvalu) visits his father with his whole family from Japan, his wife Hiroko (Kana Hashimoto) and his son Koji (Toma Hashimoto).

The Japanese Dog is a simple story, told in new creative way. The first couple of scenes, we get to understand the personality of Costache Moldu, an independent, proud and generous but not willing to receive other people generosity.  A new way of presenting characters trough actions and not talking. The whole movie feels like a documentary in the way they shoot. Always having these long scenes with a camera stuck on a tripod observing what’s happening, making it feel like a fly on the wall kind of sense of filming.

Rebengiuc performance in this movie was outstanding and I read somewhere that he is also one of Romania’s probably best actor. I do not disagree, give that man an Oscar or something, without his performance this movie would have been hard to understand without him. I just think that is performance is worth a big mention because I think that there is not a lot of people that can pull of a part like that.

One thing that makes me wonder is that there is really no background music except for when the robotic dog plays twinkle twinkle little star, one thing that I did notice was that the end credits starts with a hyped up Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, thought that was really ironic. I did get bother by it a little in the beginning but then I noticed who am I to say that movies needs music to be any good. I’m impressed that without music the movie worked and I seriously believe that this movie doesn’t really need music. The movie relays on its actors to make it good.

I’d recommend this movie to anybody with patience because the movie is really slow paced and the long scenes might feel a bit boring sometimes.