'Metronom' (2022) by the Romanian director Alexandru Belc is not a film about the legendary radio show 'Metronom' from Radio Free Europe but about the Metronom generation. For viewers who were lucky enough not to know what the life of the youth in a communist dictatorship meant and what role music played in the disintegration of propaganda and the collapse of the system in Eastern Europe, I recommend as a prelude or documentary material Leslie Woodhead's film 'How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin'. Alexandru Belc started planning for such a non-fiction film, but during the documentary process he decided to change the direction and make a fiction film instead, his debut as director in this format. The generation of Romanian teenagers from the beginning of the 70s had the chance to listen to the shows of DJ Cornel Chiriac, who broadcast from Munich about pop music and about a free world, where young people had access to all kinds of music, literature, art, culture they wished and could chat and even travel freely anywhere. For the Metronom generation, these radio shows were lessons in music and freedom. I also belong to this generation. I will try to write objectively about 'Metronom', but I can't promise that I will succeed.

The story takes place in Bucharest in the autumn of 1972, in the month of October. Romania was playing in the Davis Cup final against the USA, and snippets of the tennis matches will be shown on TV at the party that is at the center of the plot. The participants are final grade high-school students who take advantage of the absence of a girl's parents to gather, talk, smoke (tobacco) and drink, but above all to dance and listen to the music they love: Romanian pop tolerated by censorship and the Metronom radio shows of Cornel Chiriac. The young folks write a letter to Radio Free Europe in which they complain about the ideology that oppresses them and demand for their musical preferences to be broadcast. The love story between Ana (the main heroine of the film) and Sorin takes place against this background. Ana knows that Sorin will soon travel abroad and that he will not return. She wants to convince herself of his love and seal it with her first sexual experience. Sorin is behaving strangely and suddenly leaves the girl and the party. A few hours later, the Securitate invades the apartment, arrests the young people it finds there and takes them to a brutal investigation. Listening to Western music was not forbidden by law, but sending a letter to a foreign radio station was a crime in communist Romania, a crime punishable by imprisonment, with the prohibition of rights, with the impossibility of studying in a university. With violence, threats and blackmail, the security policemen try to force the young people to denounce each other and sign statements pledging to become security informers. Ana, who had come to the party to meet Sorin, finds in her the resources to resist. The investigator tells her that Sorin was the one who denounced them all. Perhaps this was his way of buying a passport to freedom? Lie or psychological pressure? Released after a nightmarish night, Ana will try to find Sorin and find out about the truth.

Alexandru Belc was born eight years after 1972. He had the chance to live through communism for only about nine years, so it cannot be said that this film conveys the result of a direct personal experience. And yet the reconstruction of the era is very accurate - the streets; the Bucharest apartments with limited spaces, full of heavy furniture and books; tape recorders and pickups used at parties; the clothing, including the hideous school uniforms with the appalling matriculation numbers. However, the reconstruction of the psychology of the characters is what impressed me the most. I think that Alexandru Belc managed to build a memorable character through Ana, helped of course by the special interpretation of the actress Mara Bugarin. I think he did very well by also looking for inspiration at his generation and the youth of the same age today. Then as now, young people wanted freedom, to listen to the music they want, to discover the world around them, to explore themselves, to love. Ana in the film has the innocence of the young woman who knows she has the right to freedom despite the lies that surround her, the dignity to resist blackmail, and the courage to live her romantic relationship despite the betrayal. Sorin's character is less fleshed out and that's a shame, because he represents the other side of the youth back then. Vlad Ivanov, always an impressive actor, also appears in the film, and the only complaint I could make is that he repeats here a type of role that he has played many times before. I liked 'Metronom' because it says a lot of true things about my generation and times that some idealize, others demonize, and which were much more complex than one extreme or the other. The ending is awesome. The young students passed the baccalaureate and seem, apparently, to have returned to the 'norm'. It is actually an open ending and even a false ending. Have they been called again to Securitate? Did some of them agree to become Securitate collaborators? What is for sure is that they will be in the streets 17 years later, among those who will destroy the system. Cornel Chiriac and his Metronom won in the end.

This one and the previous "movie" I've seen should be in a double feature.

From the stupid "kissing booth" premise to "the communist Securitate is trying to put me, a teenager, in jail for listening to Led Zeppelin and writing a freakin' letter". It really puts in perspective what kind of people we are that we allow this to happen to ourselves. We are not that anymore, we go in the streets and we peacefully protest now haha. And really puts in perspective what kind of dumb teenagers there are now, with all their freedom, bah...no wonder we are trying to keep that period longer and longer.

As a movie it keeps that communist vibe all the way, the vibe we are trying to lose in our movies now but hey, there are still stories to be told.

In order for the readers of this review to fully understand my position, I need to situate myself in the picture- the historical one, not the movie. At the time of the unfolding of that story I was 2 years younger than the protagonists, a tenth grader in one of the two best high schools in my town, an avid listener of Free Europe and a constant fan of Cornel Chiriac's Metronom, to whom I owe my still present love of good music and my sentimental involvement with good, everlasting music. To this day, every 4th of March is the day I light a candle as a remembrance of that day of 1975 when he was assassinated, in Cornel's memory. Having lived through that period and the subsequent one, it came as a shock to me to read all those reviews written either by people my age, who should have lived through similar constraints and so hopefully developed a similar attitude, or by people much younger, who completely lack the accurate information and/or the desire to get it, so they express opinions just because they can, with no relevance whatsoever to the actual events. You know what they say: "Those who ignore their past are bound to relive it." Such reviewers speak about "the plot" of the film. Guys, that "plot"was our lives, the despicable politics of the communist régime to keep your head down, your mouth shut, your "eyes on the prize"- the prize in this case being educated by the system into brainwashing and believing that the socialist/ communist régime is unquestionably the best of them all. I can't blame the generation of our parents for not fighting against the oppression, though we are currently living through times in which it is fashionable to blame it all on the parents, irrespective of generation, as long as it justifies one's failure. We, in our turn, were educated in a culture of fear of the authoritoes, of the securitate services, of each other; the older generation knew it was best to beware of everyone, since you never knew whom to trust. Actually, after the revolution of December 1989, when the archives of the securitate were opened to everyone, many of us made the epic mistake of wanting to see their own record, thus finding out that their friends, relatives and often spouses were the ones who had turned them in and gave regular reports about what was spoken in their houses. The blackmail to which the protagonists are subjected, either the classmate who thus gives his family the opportunity of fleeing the socialist Romania and living in the West, or the whole class who will only sit their finals- the bac- if they agree to collaborate with the securitate indefinitely were among us- they and their parents, making a hideous crime of the fact of listening to good, international music. For a large part of the youth of those times the importance of music to keep our heads above water, to keep us functional in a drab, gloomy world full of prejudice, fear and self loathing for not being able to do anything against it will never be underlined strongly enough. Nor will be the trauma that we lived with. I am sorry for the new generations who, unless they have been educated by parents with a strong and reliable conscience, seem to be unable to appreciate the numerous freedoms which they have, not even when faced with the harsh realities of those times. Guys, ask yourselves why those teenagers were dressed in uniforms in order to go to school, why they had numbers sewn onto said uniforms like convicts in prisons, why they were listening to music in secret and writing letters to the radio stations in the West in secret, why they were abusively taken from their houses to the securitate station. Eh? Why should you complicate yourselves with such useless questions, since you've been living in a free world, enjoying all liberties at will, having all music at your disposal, and being torn by a single type of torture: what to wear at school the next day in order to be fashionable enough. But for this you should show some curiosity and go and watch the movie. We were 4(four) people in the theater, the rest were watching Wakanda; black panthers seem more appealing and easier to watch than your recent history.

The director Alexandru Belc must have had good advisors; the period accents are well placed, the décor detalis, from house and institution furnishing and deorations to clothes and underwear, the drab atmosphere, the naiveté of the young protagonists, as opposed to the fear and precaution of their parents. The sound track must have cost a fortune out of the film budget- The Doors, Janis Joplin, I don't know about Mircea Florian or Sideral Modal Quartet, but they were rightfully chosen in a film about music, about failed lives in a failed society- not that the present society were perfect... The end of the film, showing all our protagonists debating the subject from the Romanian literature exam comes as a final blow- or maybe an expected one, depending on each viewer's experience: all our protagonists could sit the bac because they had made the pact with the devil, by signing contracts of informants with the securitate. In high school I used to have a school mate who, for a similar "crime", was forbidden to sit the bac and went to work in a coal mine, without graduating. I have no idea what became of him... The film is not perfect. If I were to direct it, I wouldn't show a boy with such long hair - at the party, the one with whom Ana dances, I wouldn't show that outburst of violence- the securitate guy smashing that other boy's face with the phone in front of so many witnesses, I would express a lot more concern about getting pregnant- a constant worry for young girls in those days.

On the whole, "Metronom" comes as close as it gets to a faithful depiction of the times, with the extensive help of the cast- Mara Bugarin, a teenager in love with her heart on her sleeve, unable to believe the sleeve could be so tainted; Vlad Ivanov, who seems to be made for roles of villains such as this one- a securitate colonel: he doesn't hesitate to threat Ana with a gang bang in the basement of the building if she doesn't cooperate, him being the father of a girl barely older than Ana. The best indicator of how much this film caught me is the fact that I simply forgot about the traditional nachos with cheese cream sauce and I left them uneaten, only to discover them almost untouched at the end of the movie. Plus the music score, which sent me back memory lane- aka Youtube- to search for those songs long unheard, but not forgotten. How could one forget "Cu pleopa de argint"- With a Silver Eyelid, by Mircea Florian, albeit a nod to Emerson, Lake and Palmer's "Lucky Man"? All in all this film is a respectful reconstitution of times that all young Romanians should know about, in order to avoid repeating them and all older Romanians should too, in order to avoid making fools of themselves when stating, full of conviction, that the socialist/ communist epoch was the best that could be and is to be regretted in contrast with the world we live in? But these representatives of the older generation could very well be the teenagers of yore...