Collective (Alexander Nanau, 2019) (Patreon)

Over on Letterboxd, I discovered a Romanian writer, a graduate student in Leeds, who'd had enough of viewers watching Collective and saying "it's just like Trump!" She (sorry -- I think she's a "she") has some fundamental biases against Americans to begin with, mostly having to do with, well, American exceptionalism, cultural imperialism, and our tendency to see ourselves reflected in everything. But she certainly has a point. Collective is a story about pervasive corruption and kleptocracy, and the sense that these things are somehow universal -- "the system's rigged," etc. -- can occlude the Romanian specificity of the film and the tragedies it details.

A massive fire happened at the Colectiv music venue in Bucharest, in the middle of a show by metal group Goodbye to Gravity. The venue, a converted shoe factory, had no fire exits, and once the flammable soundproofing material on the ceiling ignited, the building was a deathtrap. 26 young people died in the fire, but more horrifyingly, an additional 38 people died in hospital. Many of the deceased were taken to hospitals with non-fatal burns, but they died of infection over the four to five days following the fire. As discovered by investigative journalist Catalin Tolontan of the Sports Gazette newspaper, this is primarily because Romanian hospitals had been supplied with disinfectants from a privately-held domestic company, Hexa Pharma, that produced dangerously diluted, ineffective product -- in some cases, bottles of biocides labelled as containing 25% active ingredients instead contained around 1% or lower.

And this is just the beginning. As Collective unfolds, we learn about the absolute corruption of the Romanian government under the ruling Social Democratic party. It's a system of bribes and intimidation, in which mobsters with money and political clout are appointed to positions for which they are utterly unqualified -- including hospital administration. Protests following the Colectiv fire resulted in the SD government resigning, being temporarily replaced by so-called "technocrats," the populists' pejorative for the professionals and experts who were actually capable of running a nation. One of them, Vlad Voiculescu, a former patients' rights advocate, becomes Minister of Health, and the second half of Collective follows his efforts at common-sense reform, and sees them thwarted at every turn.

So in a way, the tragedy of Collective is a highly personal one. Young Romanians who care about politics -- those who are not simply disgusted with the process, or privileged enough to leave Romania for a more stable part of Europe -- see this indifference and thuggery as a matter of life and death, not a series of scandals. There are unavoidable resonances with the Trump administration -- a blatant spoils system, a faux-populist distrust of expertise, a propagandistic media, and above all, an open contempt for the very concept of a free press. But for Romanians, the U.S. seeing ourselves in Collective is probably a lot like a venture capitalist telling a homeless person, "hey! I've struggled too!"

In other words, Collective does not come close to reflecting life in America. But it's a fairly stark warning of where we could possibly end up.