Enfant terrible. Cinema Tussaud
Oskar Roehler’s Enfant Terrible won’t have an easy life in Romania. Films like this one, gestures of biographical fetishism, akin to surrendering oneself into the hands of a legend, are first facing their own ilk, the fans, the accomplices of fetish, the delicate connoisseurs who, like a hit song, become all the more valuable the more airplay they get. And Roehler penned the biography – an experimental one – to none other than R.W. Fassbinder, maybe the most popular unknown director in Romanian cinephilia. Had it been a film on Bergman, Godard, Antonioni, Fellini, or even Pasolini, things would have been a tad different. Yet the chief agitator of the New German Cinema had no place in the Romanian Cinematheque, nor in local cinema books, and the few screenings, theater adaptations, and even one stray ambitious translation couldn’t have made sense of his meteoric career, impossible to decompose in stand-alone parts: cinema, theater, and malaise. Even so, as I wrote last year when Transilvania Film had announced that they were distributing the film, one needs but a simple cursory gaze at the local cinematography to find the shortcut that Enfant terrible can use to reach the heart of the Romanian audience – Radu Gabrea’s A Man like EVA (1984), his West-German biopic shot shortly after the German filmmaker’s death from a drug overdose (1982). Anyway, I’m not beating the drum for Enfant Terrible as a film in itself, but for the cause that I’m ascribing to its arrival to Romanian screens.
Film curator, writer and editor, member of the selection committees of BIEFF and Woche der Kritik, FIPRESCI member and alumnus of the film criticism workshops organized by the Sarajevo, Warsaw and Locarno film festivals. Teaches a course on film criticism and analysis at UNATC. He has curated programs for Cinemateca Română, Short Waves, V-F-X Ljubljana, Trieste Film Festival, as well as the Bucharest retrospective of Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour in 2024 and 2025.
