• Release year: 2024
• Director: Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Radu Jude.
• Producers: Alexandru Teodorescu.
• Screenplay by: Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Radu Jude.
• Editing by: Catalin Cristutiu.

Shotgun Commentary: fascinating essay on how advertising shapes and reflects society.

Review

Eight Postcards from Utopia is a collage of videos, much like From My Cold Dead Hands (2024), but centred in Rumanian culture. As the title hints, the narrative is fragmented in eight parts, nine if you count the epilogue, although you shouldn’t. All the parts together offer an insightful perspective of Rumania in the 90s and 00s, the societal, economic and politic changes, as well as their idea of entertainment and fun.

Memory preservation

The feature begins with a title card that reads “1. History of Romania”. This “postcard” is the longest one and offers a bit of historical context. Since it is all a sequence of advertisements, you won’t get a very accurate historical account. Instead, you will get a much more fascinating piece of information: the Rumanians’ attitude towards history.

From the beginning, this portrayal of a country exclusively through its advertisements is a fun experiment. However, soon you realise it is a lot more than entertaining, it is ironically one of the most realistic portrayals you can make of a country. Advertisements need to appeal to their audience, they need to imitate reality and promise exactly that the viewers crave in order to be effective. As such, they are, in retrospective, the obvious choice to showcase a general, as-objective-as-possible view of society.

After a quick summary of Romania’s history, the documentary dives into the investment craze brought by the Mass Privatisation Programme, the economic crisis and desperation to get money fast: gambling, competitions, loans, etc. Then, it gives way to the use of special effects and animations to advertise any and all products, either basing their results on scientific experiments, or comparing them to magic.

Men will be boys

After that comes the real deal: sexism. While the issue is hinted at from the very beginning, the postcards 5 though 8 expose the extent of the problem. The first one of the bunch is a narrative of men from the moment they are born until after they die.

Unsurprisingly, all the narratives have in common a woman cleaning in the background. The man is a baby? The mother cleans after him while the dad plays with him. The man is boy? He hates pink, can’t be friends with girls, and his mother cleans the stains in his clothes. The man is a young adult? He looks at women’s asses and complains about how women want him to act his age. And his mother still cleans for him. The man is an adult and a father? Same narrative only the girls he looks at are still the same age as the ones he looked at when he was 16, it’s his wife that cleans, and now he plays with the kids while the mother picks up after all of them. The man is old now, his wife still cleans, he still acts like a kid and complains that his wife wants him to act more maturely. You see the pattern, yeah?

Comodifying women

The slimy ogling of really young women by teens and greasy old men alike is further highlighted in the next sections. A TV contest directed to men where they get a cash price if they recognise who a pair of breasts belong to is probably the highlight of the whole ordeal. The fact that this advertisement in particular is in the section named “Found Poetry” is honestly a stroke of genius. The next postcard is about consumerism. It focuses on the five senses and how they are activated through marketing. Shocking no one, women are still the objects subjected to the male gaze, taste, smell… you get the idea.

The last section is called “Masculine Feminine”, and yes, it is the marketing equivalent of boys=blue, girls=pink. Women appear almost naked next to food, you know, as products often do. They walk by like chunks of meat with a bunch of men around them salivating, they are helpless creatures that need men desperately… all of this, of course, with their corresponding ass close-ups and so on. What about men, then? You can surely imagine. They are fighters, gladiators, strong heroes that drive women crazy and live in the gym. Almost as realistic as the female portrayal, really.

All in all, Eight Postcards from Utopia does a great job in two things: proving that advertisements are a really valuable historical resource, and showcasing the toxicity of patriarchal brainwashing for both men and women. Additionally, it manages to bring forward some pretty hilarious advertisements that are the product of pure marketing wit.

Advice to take from this movie:

• Your country’s advertisements say more about your country than you think.
• A crazy video collage is always a good idea.
• Never clean after an adult. It’s not your problem that they can’t do it themselves.

What’s your take? Have you watched Eight Postcards from Utopia? Don’t hesitate to let me know your thoughts in the comments section below, or leave a message in my contact page! For more reviews and cinema-related articles, check out the rest of my blog! 😀