Anishoara is an art movie of breathtaking visual quality. It also has a remarkable sense of time and place and . That place is the rural back country of Moldovia, a small, impoverished country wedged between Romania and Ukraine. That time is now, although it could just as easily be in a past century.
The visual artistry comes from writer-director Ana Felicia Scutelnicu, a Moldovan director who studied in Germany. I saw her first 61-minute feature Panihide, at the 2013 Cinequest. In both Panihida and Anishoara, Scutelnicu demonstrates a fine eye both for landscape and human observation. However, her pace is sloooooow. Scutelnicu is so gifted as a visual director, I’d really like to see a movie that she directs from someone else’s screenplay.
Anishoara begins with an Icarus-like folk parable about a girl’s unsuccessful quest to love the sun deity. We then see that tale reflected in a girl’s daily life over a year, as she sequentially deflects three suitors. Anishoara’s star is the non-professional actress Anishoara Morari, who was about 12-years-old in Panihide and about 16 in Anishoara. Morari is beautiful, with an unusual directness of gaze, and exudes striking alertnesss.
Not everyone is going to be able to stay with a movie this (ahem) unhurried, but the whole thing is great to look at. I’m thinking of a nighttime scene where we see Anishoara sitting on the ground in her cobalt dress before the camera pans to the landscape across a valley and the dramatic sky above. Every so often there’s a shot like that makes you gasp.