The Beheaded Rooster

I wrote a comment to the film The Beheaded Rooster over at the IMDb site. I watched it this morning and enjoyed it. It got mixed reviews, and two of the three comments at the IMDb site also were pretty negative. I'll limit my comments here to supplemental information. 

As an aside, my grandfather left Siebenbürgen before 1913 when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He went to Vienna and then on to the US. He spoke a clear high German with a slight accent colored by his time in Vienna with just a touch of Slavic inflection. As the press for the film points out, the history of Germans in Siebenbürgen goes back 800 years.

I thought both female leads -- neither of whom I was familiar with -- were quite good and that both could have careers in Germany, if not in the US.  As it turns out, one of them "Alicja Bachleda" did subsequently appear in the film Trade, which also got mixed reviews.

Alicja Bachleda played the

Jewish girl Gisela

Ioana Iacob played the rich girl Alfa

The film is based on a novel by Eginald Schlattner.  It is set in a German-speaking section of Romania before and during World War II.  It is a tale of growing up in a particular time and place.  I'd recommend checking out this english-language site to get some more background on the film.  Schlattner himself also is quite an interesting figure, as well as being somewhat controversial in Romania.

"Among the few [Transylvania Saxons who did not flee and who were not killed after WWII] (today there are an estimated 14,000 to 15,000 compared with 250,000 earlier) was the novelist Eginald Schlattner, born in 1933, a Transylvanian Saxon. Schlattner started to write after the Second World War. He was captured by the Securitate secret service and tortured by them until he betrayed five German-speaking writer colleagues and even his own brother. They were sentenced to long years of forced labour. Schlattner himself was sentenced to two years for 'failure to denounce high treason'. The victims never forgave Schlattner and he has never reconciled himself to the betrayal, as he admits himself."

The film focuses more on the relationships between and among four young Transylvania Saxons and their graduating class.  The political environment plays a secondary role.  Only at the end of the film does the war come to the village where the film is set.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention that Alicja Bachleda appears to be married to Colin Ferrell now.  Maybe he recognized her talent.