Collective (2019, Alexander Nanau) (Patreon)

54/100

Looks as if I'm alone in perceiving this as two distinct films clumsily stitched together. (Three, arguably, but let's hold off on the third.) Sure, both concern the same subject, and the first creates the conditions for the second; I don't blame Nanau for following the story where it led. But there's my issue (shared by few if any others): I'm not much interested in cinema-as-raw-journalism, hence not inclined to forgive artistic shapelessness on the grounds that investigative rigor demanded new priorities. At some point—and Nanau reportedly spent 18 months in post, so he certainly had time—you need to decide what film you're making, as opposed to what public-interest truth you're pursuing. Which may require scrapping a lot of work that was absolutely necessary to arrive at the big picture, yet no longer fits it. (This doesn't even address the much more frustrating—and thus universally dismissed/ignored—situation in which you shoot for months or even years but never find a coherent, compelling film at all. That's the inherent danger of winging it! But all of those docs get completed nonetheless, because who wants to have wasted that much effort?) Imagine a version of Capturing the Friedmans that introduces Arnold Friedman around the midpoint, or a Thin Blue Line that spends its first half entirely on Dr. Grigson before suddenly switching focus to Randall Adams' case. That's more or less what we have here, though it seems to bother nobody but me.

In truth, it'd probably bother me less if I found Collective's two halves equally riveting, as most people apparently do. But the footage of Catalin Tolantan and his fellow...sports reporters? kinda wish this Teen Vogue-ish oddity had been addressed at some point...anyway, the Spotlight-y stuff that initially dominates the film just made me wish—as is so often the case with advocacy docs—that I were reading a detailed magazine piece instead. It's the horrifying facts of Romanian hospital administration that are worthy of attention; the means by which those facts are brought to light just isn't terribly cinematic, unless you're more fascinated than I am by people sitting in parked cars snapping photos of a corrupt official and remarking that he looks corrupt, i.e. has a corrupt-looking face. (???) Only when the Social Democrats get the boot, and Nanau starts following new health minister Vlad Voiculescu around on a whirlwind tour of deeply ingrained national graft, do we start getting moments that are better served by moving images than they would be by paragraphs (though, even then, I kept wondering whether a Graduation-style fiction might be superior). You could describe, for example, Voiculescu blithely dismissing one functionary's desperate entreaty for the minister to bury some damning info—noting, as I'll do now, the incredulous glances he tosses to others in the room as he casually noshes his way through the entire conversation—but it wouldn't match the power of actually seeing it. Ideally, the whole movie would be about Voiculescu, and none of it (vis-à-vis that third film I mentioned above) would be about Tedy Ursuleanu, a defiantly inspirational victim of the Colectiv fire who, as far as I can tell, didn't suffer from medical malpractice and properly belongs in some other documentary that examines the fire itself (which is remarkably, disturbingly similar to the 2003 Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island). We don't even really find out what becomes of the man—the Social Democrats regain power in the next election, and the film just ends (with a family's graveside visit to a victim about whom we know almost nil). Seems blatantly, obviously messy to me. But then, I also thought Ad Astra was blatantly, obviously terrible, and most everyone else loved that, too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯