MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Requiem’: Inside the Romanian Revolution

Robert Dornhelm’s “Requiem for Dominic” (at the Royal) takes us into the very heart of a revolution as few films have. What we discover there is a chaos in which it is often unclear who is friend and who is foe, who is winning and who is losing. This was especially true of the recent Romanian revolution, which unleashed decades of suppressed anger aimed at bringing down the hated dictator Ceaucescu but which easily raged out of control, claiming the innocent as well as the guilty.

It was in such a climate that Dominic Paraschiv, a 40-year-old chemist, met his fate in December, 1989. Exhausted from helping defend the factory where he works and which the Securitate, Ceaucescu’s secret police, has threatened to blow up, he starts waving a rifle, ordering his fellow workers to recite a Latin prayer. Our next view of him is in a hospital bed, where he lies naked, having been shot in the stomach three times. A huge fish net imprisons him, and he has been branded “The Butcher of Temesvar,” responsible for killing 80 of his co-workers.

A native of Temesvar, Dornhelm emigrated to Austria at the age of 13 in 1960 with his family. He could not believe that the man he had known from childhood could become a mass murderer. What Dornhelm was certain of was that he had to find out for himself, and he began this film as a kind of quest that paralleled the actual investigation that was under way at the very time he commenced filming, some three months after the revolution.

“Requiem for Dominic” is an amazing, near-seamless blend of fact and fiction of overwhelming immediacy that arrives at a persuasive sense of truth. Dornhelm and his writers’ principal invention is an alter ego for Dornhelm, the intellectual Paul Weiss (Felix Mitterer), who returns to Temesvar after many years’ absence with a group of Viennese humanitarians in order to try to see his friend Dominic in the hospital. Not only is he blocked by soldiers from doing so but is soon in danger himself. Dominic’s resilient wife (Angelica Schutz) urges him to investigate, and a smart, tenacious journalist (Viktoria Schubert) joins forces with him.

Now based in Los Angeles, Dornhelm has made dance documentaries and directed the modest, offbeat comedies “Echo Park” and “Cold Feet.” None of these endeavors, which are of varying quality, prepare us for “Requiem for Dominic,” which was made fast and cheap as an Austrian production.

His interspersing of documentary footage shot by others with his own material is inspired; his film is a mosaic of jagged cinema verite style bits and pieces that by the end have formed an aesthetic whole at once raw, emotion-charged and transcendentally beautiful, an effect underlined by Harald Kloser’s tense, keening score.

Dornhelm’s cinematographer, Hans Selikovsky, is a wizard of dexterity, weaving in and out of crowds, up and down buildings and is magical in his use of natural light. The film is suffused with love and hate and turmoil and pain but also at times an exuberant joy.

“Requiem for Dominic” (rated R for graphic shots of the victims of violence) is a work of unceasing passion and considerable suspense and excitement, and certainly Dornhelm has been transformed by having made it.