The Treasure review – an abundance of riches beneath the soil

Some jokes are maybe worth a snigger at first. Then it gets repeated and it gets a full-on laugh. Then it gets hammered into the ground and you find yourself laughing more at the audacity than the joke itself. This is very much the case with Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Treasure (Comoara), which won the Un Certain Talent prize at the 2015 Cannes film festival. What’s remarkable is that it isn’t even a clever joke. The most memorable part of this small gem of a film is the sound of a metal detector going zoooWOOOOOOooooop over and over as three well-meaning but slightly dopey everymen putter around in an overgrown yard.

First we meet Costi (Toma Cuzin), a softly spoken young father driving his kid in the rain. “You’re not Robin Hood,” the child accuses, rejecting an excuse for picking him up late. Later, when he’s reading from a picture book about the brave man who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, there’s a knock at the plain, grey door set in the plain grey wall in the plain grey building. It’s neighbour Adrian (Adrian Purcărescu), looking to borrow money.

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After an unhurried, detailed and quiet series of conversations, some against a painfully dull and underlit, off-white tiled wall, we learn that Adrian is in debt (he mortgaged at the wrong time), but he has a solution. For 800 euros he can rent a metal detector and find his family’s lost buried treasure in an abandoned country house a few hours’ drive away.

Eventually the two men team up, but where a “normal” movie would smash cut to the hitting the road, Porumboiu’s route isn’t that simple. It’s foolish to put an entire national cinema in a box, but in some cases, patterns do emerge. The Romanian new wave, about a decade old by now, shows no sign of changing – and that’s entirely in tune with a style that is persistent, relentless and challenging. Not challenging to watch, as the frequently mundane subjects offer a “what you see is what you get” experience, but to audiences who may eventually want to shout, “Oh, get on with it” at the screen.

Within this frustration a deeper truth lies. As a sick old man gets lost in healthcare bureaucracy in Cristi Piuiu’s The Death of Mr Lăzărescu and a young woman slowly succumbs to madness in an orthodox convent in Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills, traces of dark humour begin to magnify. Laughs emerge from the recognisable micro-horrors found in modern living, which, if the world was run in the way we all agree it should be run, wouldn’t exist.

So Costi tries to get a metal detector, but at first it’s too expensive. Then a worker at the rental shop (Corneliu Cozmei) will do it on the sly, but before they can leave Costi has a chat with his boss. When he goes to get the metal detector he has to slip away from his desk. His boss finds out about the absence and demands to know the truth. Costi confesses, but the boss won’t hear of it, he wants to know about his affair with a female colleague (which is purely in the boss’s imagination). These boring tangents are a hilarious kind of agony, and Porumboiu reveals himself to be a storytelling sadist. We’re nowhere closer to the buried treasure, but what’s striking is that all of this minutiae is given just as much screen time and is imbued with just as much drama as the “plot” of the film. This will infuriate many, but delight others. The Treasure’s pace is that of an old man that’s been drinking beer since 9am and is trying to tell you a story.

The Treasure, which begins with a conversation about Robin Hood, eventually reveals itself to be a homegrown fable. Adrian’s family’s hidden riches are in Islaz, where the Romanian proclamation of 1848 took place. Moreover, lost treasure is something of a real and touchy subject between Romania and Russia. The longest section of the picture is spent scanning a piece of lawn, listening to electronic whoops, poking at a computer scanner that no one really knows how to work and, eventually, digging. There’s a twist and then an even bigger twist, neither of which I saw coming, but both are absolutely perfect. You don’t have to be a scholar of late 20th-century Romanian economics to get the satire. However, I suspect that those who do catch the signifiers will find even more riches in the soil. Those who don’t, but stay with it to the end, will still reap reward.