A Haunting Ghost: Milk Teeth
In his upcoming book, based on interviews led by Claudia Nedelcu Duca, Andrei Ujică remarks at one point that “the colour palette of the Ceaușescu era was a gradient from ‘Săpânța blue’ to ‘Ceaușescu’s livid grey’.” That shade of “Ceaușescu’s livid grey,” Ujică adds, “should be officially recorded as a colour, so it isn’t forgotten.” I haven’t forgotten it. Having recently written a memoir, I spent much time digging through my memories of the 1980s (I was 11 when the Revolution happened), and in many of those memories from the decade’s dying end, the light takes on a terminal, sickly quality – like a thin layer of spectral film. My world then, in the spring or autumn of 1989, as much of it as I can still reassemble, is a haunted one. And because the Revolution suddenly descends upon it, seemingly to bury it, to sink it like Atlantis or the Titanic, my post-’89 world remains haunted too – by what was buried or sunk back then.
The talented filmmaker Mihai Mincan (who is two years younger than me) hasn’t forgotten either. His second feature, Milk Teeth, is an effort to capture this double haunting. The story unfolds in April ’89, October ’89, and March ’90, in an unnamed industrial town (shot in Lupeni, Petroșani, and Vulcan), where a little girl (Lara Maria Alexandra Comănescu) takes out the trash and simply vanishes, leaving behind a sister (Emma Ioana Mogoș) and two parents (Marina Palii and Igor Babiac, both deeply affecting, especially in a scene where they exchange consoling caresses in the dark) – three lives now haunted. A policeman (István Téglás) opens an investigation. He seems decent enough – he has a moustache, is bald, left-handed, and speaks with an earnestness that suggests a desperate wish to be believed. Yet he feels less like a detective than an undertaker or a priest – his gaze feverish, hinting at a secret inner fire. “Children disappear,” he murmurs, resigned. “Some we find, or they return home. Others stay gone.” As if saying: “That’s just the climate here in the twilight zone.” The mother suspects him of doing nothing. Still, there are leads: a mad-looking man has been seen wandering in the area, talking to himself. Rumours spread of kidnappers in black clothes (one girl even claims they wore masks), driving black Dacias with odd license plates. When we hear the mother has begun roaming the neighbourhood, investigating on her own, we fear she will stumble into danger, perhaps discover something monstrous (and allegorical), coming from very high up – like those conspiracy theories linking Jack the Ripper to Queen Victoria. Even without any confirmed conspiracy, the mystery could easily become a study of her descent into the abyss – a Pororoca (2017, Constantin Popescu) pulled into the sinister, decaying paranoia of the late Ceaușescu era.
But Milk Teeth is not that film. So what is it? When the missing girl’s eight- or nine-year-old sister (the same age Mincan was in ’89) begins exploring abandoned factories, another possible answer emerges: a cross between Cireșarii and Picnic at Hanging Rock. Her wanderings – more dreamlike than real from a certain point onward – against the backdrop of a crumbling dictatorship, recall the young heroines of two Spanish allegorical fairy tales, The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973) and Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006), set during the Francoist regime. At one point, she stumbles upon a lair that looks like it belongs to a serial killer – bathed in red light, walls plastered with photographs of children’s smiles frozen into rictus. It feels like a scene from a Romanian horror film not yet made, but long yearned for by horror enthusiasts. In recent years, filmmakers like Radu Muntean, Cristian Mungiu, Cecília Felméri, and even Mincan himself (with his debut To the North) have shown hints that they could make first-rate horror (not for nothing has Ari Aster declared himself a Mungiu fan). But apart from Muntean’s partial foray in the short Index, none has made the leap. Nor does Mincan here. Milk Teeth does not fulfil its potential as a genre film. It is something else. It is an exercise in hauntology.
The twilight-communist world of Milk Teeth is undeniably one of sadness. Of desolation. Political-economic references are scarce, but Mincan conveys desolation by reconstructing that provincial, end-times atmosphere from just a handful of apartment buildings and vacant lots, plus a market, a monument, a school and very few passersby.
Mincan, who studied philosophy, surely knows that Marx described communism in 1848 as a ghost haunting Europe. And that in 1993, Jacques Derrida coined the French neologism hantologie (in English, hauntology), a slippery term but a fitting one for the ways the bygone communist era continues to haunt the post-89 world. Mincan’s take on this idea has little to do with the clichéd anticommunist rhetoric about how communist reflexes and mentalities never left us. His approach is closer to Ostalgie – nostalgia for Eastern Europe in the Cold War era – but stripped of propaganda or ideology. What we see is pure emotional (self-)archaeology. Nabokovian Speak, Memory-like gestures staged in a Lynchian register on a communist wasteland: clumsy as the approximation may be, it points in the right direction.
The twilight-communist world of Milk Teeth is undeniably one of sadness. Of desolation. Political-economic references are scarce, but Mincan conveys desolation by reconstructing that provincial, end-times atmosphere from just a handful of apartment buildings and vacant lots, plus a market, a monument, a school (where the little detective, a second-grader, is preparing for her Pioneers’ oath) – and very few passersby. (The film features remarkably few characters overall.) Poverty is evident. The world seems drained of blood – vampirised. People speak only in murmurs – the entire world feels like a house where someone has just died. And yet, there is often sunlight – pale autumn sun filtering through dusty windows, haloing the mother’s and daughter’s hair. (They keep touching each other’s hair: the daughter helps her mother wash hers; the mother braids the daughter’s.) Not always sun – there is also October fog over a shabby basketball court – but when it does appear, the light inside apartments is amber, heartbreaking. And at night, when the power cuts out (as it often does), the atmosphere becomes eerily solemn. Desolation, yes, but never without a spectral radiance. There is something deeply sinister here – Mincan and his cinematographer George Chiper-Lillemark linger insistently on darkness, leaving the screen black for long stretches. Radio voices crackle through as if from the other side – distorted, spectral, soul-snatching. The music (Marius Leftărache) and sound design (Nicolas Becker) are fantastic (as they were in Mincan’s previous film). Normally, I dislike reviews that break films down into departments – an adjective for the sets, another for the costumes – but here I feel obliged to bow to Anamaria Țecu (production design) and Dana Păpăruz (costumes). Together with the others mentioned, they make Mincan’s images and sounds resonate with spooky yet tender vibes, unlike anything I’ve encountered in other Romanian films about the 1980s – tuned to my own hauntings from those years.
The film’s centrepiece is a scene where another girl in the neighbourhood, who claims to have seen something that day, invites the protagonist into her home and, before revealing what she knows, puts on Gershon Kingsley’s synthesiser hit “Popcorn.” The track, fabulously ‘80s despite being from 1969, fills the room as she begins to dance – producing an effect at once luminous, uncanny, and, I’m tempted to say, quintessentially hauntological.
I hope Mincan’s film receives the recognition it deserves. And I hope that ideologues on both sides – anticommunists and anti-anticommunists alike, both prone to manipulating art with heavy hands – handle this film, for once, with delicacy.
Milk Teeth had its first screening on August 29, as part of the Orizzonti Competition at the Venice Film Festival.
Andrei Gorzo
Critic de film (n. 1978). Publică din 1996. Este conferențiar universitar la UNATC, unde predă din 2004. Filmul lui preferat este Al treilea om/ The Third Man(1949). Scrie pe andreigorzoblog.wordpress.com.
Title
Milk Teeth
Director/ Screenwriter
Mihai Mincan
Actors
Marina Palii, Igor Babiac, Emma Mogoș, István Téglás
Country
Romania, France, Denmark, Bulgaria, Greece
Year
2025
Synopsys
In the final days of Ceausescu\'s Romania, a ten-year-old girl becomes the last witness to her sister\'s mysterious disappearance and must find the courage to grow up in a collapsing world.
Andrei Gorzo
Critic de film (n. 1978). Publică din 1996. Este conferențiar universitar la UNATC, unde predă din 2004. Filmul lui preferat este Al treilea om/ The Third Man(1949). Scrie pe andreigorzoblog.wordpress.com.