Viennale-Trailer 2024 0.0

The trailer tends to be a montage-based form, condensing a feature film into an alluring digest that aims to sell the coming attraction— but not this time; Radu Jude isn’t one to abide by convention. The director trains his camera on a musical performance, cutting only once. Clad in traditional Romanian dress, Nicoleta Tudorache sits at a trapezoidal wooden box bearing more than one hundred steel and copper strings: a cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer that is the national instrument of Hungary and closely associated with Roma folk music. She is a picture of concentration, striking her desired tones with precision and grace to voice a distinctly Viennese tune, Johann Strauss’s 1858 “Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka”. The title of her chosen composition evokes chit-chat and gossip, devalued yet passionate modes of speech in which authenticity is never guaranteed and often thrown entirely out the window. And so it is for Jude’s trailer, which playfully runs roughshod over the supposed purity of national patrimony, getting it so wrong that it becomes right. It might seem light-hearted, but at a time when violent claims to blood and soil are on the rise, this delightful overture across borders is a rose sharp with thorns. (Erika Balsom)