Merman, or the fragmented memories of a composer in communist times
A documentary made entirely from archival footage, Merman (Triton) by Ana Lungu is as daring as it is radical, recounting in fragments the life of a Romanian artist before the 1989 Revolution. Awarded the FIPRESCI Prize at the Transylvanian International Film Festival (TIFF) in Cluj-Napoca, Merman strongly resonates with the festival’s rich “Romanian Days” program.
It seems that contemporary Romanian cinema is deeply invested in revisiting the traumas and lingering memories of the nation’s past. Indeed, among the eight films selected for the “Romanian Days” section—dedicated to new Romanian cinema—two directly address the end of the communist regime in 1989: the documentary Bright Future by Andra MacMasters and the fiction film The New Year That Never Came (Anul Nou care n-a fost) by Bogdan Mureșanu. The latter, a notable festival success (already awarded a FIPRESCI Prize in Venice), concludes with the iconic televised images of the December 21 demonstration, where Ceausescu addressed the crowd—an event that served as a prelude to the regime change in Romania. Bright Future, on the other hand, is composed entirely of archival footage from a report on the “Festival of Youth” held in Pyongyang in that same fateful year, 1989.
Another standout in the Romanian Days selection is Merman (Triton) by Ana Lungu, also composed entirely of amateur archival footage. It tells many the stories, but mostly one about a forgotten composer who lived between World War II and the 1989 Revolution. Everything we know about him, we learn through the text read by the narrator, and what is presented as rediscovered home movies. With a voice-over that is deliberately understated, emotionally restrained, and intentionally imperfect, Ana Lungu narrates that life of a hedonist who loved travel and women. He especially loved filming them: one reel is entirely devoted to erotic and pornographic footage of faceless female bodies. In a country where the possession of pornographic material was a crime, the composer was taking a considerable risk by shooting these films. Perhaps that is why the bodies are anonymized—though to a 2025, post-#MeToo audience, it also raises questions about the male gaze and the objectification of women’s bodies.
Of course, Ana Lungu is not primarily interested in this particular composer’s biography (indeed, it is deliberately unclear what is real and what is fictional in her narration—and that’s entirely beside the point). Merman is, ultimately, a portrait of Romania during the communist era—just like Bright Future and The New Year That Never Came. But unlike those two, which are very successful in their own right, Merman does not approach the subject head-on. There is no history lesson, no political analysis. In fact, very few images were filmed in Romania—the footage is mostly from vacations. Merman is not a self-portrait of an artist from the Eastern Bloc, but rather a fragmented sketch (the film is divided into chapters) of a pleasure seeker living in an austere society.
Merman feels like the Eastern Bloc’s response to the famous Anonymous Project, which collects and exhibits old family photographs from the second half of the 20th century, in a very American-centric perspective. Amid the composer’s travels through major Soviet cities, seaside resorts, and the occasional capital beyond the Iron Curtain, there is, just in the middle of the film, this mysterious collection of pornographic images (interspersed with shots of flowers). Was the composer a sex addict? A man frustrated by the erotic deprivation imposed by the regime? Or did he see himself—artist that he was—as an heir to Gustave Courbet or Botticelli, a painter of nudes in troubled times?
Like all good films, Merman offers no definitive answers, no ready-made moral judgments. It merely gives us glimpses of a vanished era through the blurry, incomplete visual memories of a whimsical and enigmatic (anti-)hero. Just two or three things we know about him.
By Pierre Charpilloz
Edited by Birgit Beumers
Copyright FIPRESCI