The Manuscript

Lucian Grozav’s The Manuscript is a film beguiling in concept but tonally confusing in its execution. This near 30-minute Romanian piece tells an intriguingly insular story belonging to the sci-fi genre. Much like Blade Runner, we open on a gripping series of captions which establishes the world of the film and the abstract conceit we’ll have to keep in mind – that a group of people from various scientific, educational, agricultural professions have been tasked with building a new society on Mars; we follow the one and only philosopher employed by this program, tasked with writing a religious text for a new people. For its ethical complications and futuristic musings, this is a terrific setup which immediately grabbed this critic. It’s interesting, therefore, that the creative angle the writer-director-star takes from that point is one of domestic realism, slow reflection and sly referential aesthetics.

While watching, I attempted to draw comparisons between Grozav’s film and anything at all similar to such an unusual and tonally mixed creation. The closest, one could argue, is Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville; belonging to the canon of the French New Wave – utilising audacious formal traits commercial audiences are not used to – yet also clearly being something you can label as pulpy genre-fare. It’s a work of dystopia and of science-fiction, with a deeply personal, transgressive vision driving how we interpret the story. Similar to The Manuscript, it’s also a film which uses urban photography in a way that’s meant to suggest a strange, alternate future (despite the respective towns and cities looking as they do normally for the most part).

Continuing with this theme of city photography, the film makes very obvious and pointed reference to Manhattan through its use of a George Gershwin soundtrack. I would argue that this is too obvious for its own good, and is also truly drawn-out to the point of it being unignorable. The filmmaker clearly wishes the viewer to place this work in parallel to the controversial 1979 release. This theme also announces a massive departure from the Kubrickian ambiguity of the opening act. What it ultimately adds to the piece, one supposes, is some kind of self-reflexive mixture of sentimentality and ostentatious editorial flare, but I think it could do without it.

As a whole, it’s admirable to see a no-budget ‘genre’ movie - made, impressively, by only one person - take the more difficult route to success. Unwilling to compromise its big ideas for a conceit more aligned with your conventional shoestring short, The Manuscript successfully manages to channel its ambition via a minimalistic approach; using unremarkable settings and normal moments to express something abnormal and cerebral. To use a completely random example that springs to mind, consider how Jim Jarmusch managed to make such a great vampire movie in Only Lovers Left Alive despite it mostly being just two individuals chatting in a room. There’s a similar filmic philosophy at play here. By the end, what we have is a work, seemingly calculated and challenging by its opening approach, turned sentimental and – though not quite indulgent – perhaps overly playful with its previously tactile ideas. Yet this critic greatly enjoyed the experience of watching much of this movie.