Review by Fabian On 23-Oct-2023
Northeastern Bulgaria: Shumen
Blaga is a retired teacher and is 70 years old. She has recently lost her husband and is engaged in purchasing a plot for her burial when the time comes.
The tombstone will have a cross on her side and, on her husband's side, more devoted to Lenin than to Jesus Christ, a red star, but since political symbols are not allowed, the star will be black.
They had saved some money, but the day before the down payment for the land, she falls victim to a phone scam and loses everything.
The shock leaves her stunned for a while, and the police involve her, along with another victim like her, in preventive activities.
The newspapers give a severe portrayal of her, describing her as demented, which does not reflect the reality at all.
Blaga finds herself humiliated, without money, and looking for a job impossible to find for a 70-year-old woman.
She tries everything, even pawning the household furniture and her late husband's old car: she cannot resign herself to losing a dignified burial for herself and her deceased spouse.
She confesses to the commissioner that she has followed the rules all her life: being a careful woman, she gets an idea and intends to pursue it.
The scam scene, like the whole film, has a gripping rhythm, focused mainly on the unmistakable face of the lead actress Eli Skorcheva.
The final chapter of Komandarev's trilogy on Bulgarian social issues, after Directions and Rounds, it is the dramatic way of the cross of a strict and honest woman who faces crime targeting the most defenseless and fragile, often poor like the elderly.
A crime involving Romanian organizations looking for desperate people willing to do anything to survive the cruelty of existence.
It is no coincidence that even in a Bulgarian town ranked tenth by population, it is impossible to lead a peaceful life free from criminal/bureaucratic/social injustices.
A careful look at the elderly, still present and active, yet used as merchandise to be defrauded and deceived, but never considered as a workforce even though they could still contribute to their and the country's well-being.
Faced with despair and the inability to remedy her condition, Blaga will have to radically reconsider her way of being until she demolishes her vision of herself and the world.
Who better than Eli Skorcheva could play this role? She had given up her acting career due to the new market demands dictated by the fall of the old political system in Bulgaria.
And Blaga, coming from a generation that lived in a highly controlled political/social context, yet less commercial, finds herself in a post-communist reality now completely at the mercy of the most brutal capitalism that respects and pities no one.
Even her private lessons to a young girl who wants to obtain Bulgarian citizenship after fleeing with her mother from a violent and precarious reality will be the emblematic element and the film's common thread: the real meaning of the title will be fully understood only at the end.
Illiteracy, petty crime, poverty at the mercy of economic-financial speculation.
Money, now a symbolic bearer of all values, demolishes by choice or necessity the principles that had accompanied Blaga's life until she adopts an unpredictably cynical and unscrupulous behavior in a film with a chilling ending.
Can a true Christian love capitalism? Because if it is true that on one hand, it has been possible to quantify the victims of communism, the victims of capitalism, on the other hand, are not quantified by anyone.
23-Oct-2023 by Fabian