This film seemed to me quite remarkable for the way it created the feeling of what it might have been like to have lived in the kind of repressive society typical of Romania before 1989. Radu and Anca seem to be Socialist activists working to improve the lives of their fellow workers, but the approach seems to me also allegorical of the kind of paranoid society that typified Romania's police state under the Ceausescu regime. The comparison made by one viewer between Radu and James Bond doesn't wash, really (where are the guns and the gimmicks? This film goes beyond adolescent foolishness). The film is about betrayal, after all, isn't it? And there are monsters lurking in the Socialist shadows: Note, for example, the Iron Guard thugs that intrude upon the dance and break up the festivities. (The Iron Guard was a Fascist group that originated in the city of Iasi in the province of Moldavia before World War II, but there is no context to explain that for non-Romanian viewers.) The style of the film is far more complex that earlier commentaries here suggested, it seems to me. The end of the film at the Black Sea port of Constanza, brings to my mind Antoine Doinel's run to the sea at the end of Truffaut's The 400 Blows. And note the foreshadowing of the flash cuts inserted passim, the elevator descending, for example, with the people looking downward, horrified, and, of course, we don't see what is so horrifying to them until the very end of the film. Likewise, the shots of Anca, fallen, the sound of the mechanism of the elevator, the grinding noises of the cable as the elevator runs, the cables turning on their spindles. All of this is very effective visual foreshadowing for the menace to come. Finally, the authorities with their topcoats and silk scarves, looking for all the world like the fatcats of the nomenclatura. For these and other reasons, I believe the film was more evocative of Romania of the Securitate than of the earlier period during which, presumably, it was set. Nowadays audiences outside of Romania seem enchanted with what they believe to be a so-called New Wave (though Cristian Mungiu, the director of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. has denied this to be the case), but this film reminds us that the work of Lucian Pintilie deserves to be revisited, and that solid work had been done in Romania under Ceausescu's Socialism. I was privileged to see the film at the Siskel Theatre in Chicago; I hope it eventually reaches a larger art-house circuit.