Actor-turned-director Horatiu Malaele's debut feature, jumping on the bandwagon of Romanian New Wave movement in the noughties, SILENT WEDDING abandons itself to its categorically anti-Soviet ideologue nearly at the expense of a galvanizing story. The frame story is set in the present day Romania, a TV crew specializing in paranormal stories, arrives in a desolate area used to be a Communist factory, affected by a spine-tingling frisson whipped up by the presence of a ghostly bride and the remnant old women-in-black there, a witness recounts the harrowing extirpation of the village to build the factory in 1953, the year when Joseph Stalin died. A joyous and rumbustious flashback makes heavy weather about its bucolic landscape and community, peopled by foul-mouthed but overall congenial countryfolk, amongst which a pair of young lovers Mara (Andreea Victor) and Iancu (Potocean) are going to get married (their mutual orgasm is rendered in exhilarating high pitch). Concomitantly Malaele threads farcical episodes of Communist party recruitment (highlighted by slo-motion and slapstick antics) into the through-line, where an event of open-air cinema is interrupted by a passing circus, whose own hilarity is sequentially, abruptly bookended by a tragic death of a young village girl (implied at the hands of a Russian type) and the departure of Iancu's best friend, the homunculus Sile (Palin). On that wedding day, bad tidings is brought by a Soviet officer that due to the death of Stalin the night before, the whole country is entering a 7-days mourning, wedding is forbidden, anyone who revolts will be executed with high treason. Thus, it triggers the "silent wedding", a weighty defiance against authoritarianism, the film reaches its winning apotheosis in the collectively endeavored cooperation to not make any jarring noise in their covert celebration, including using cloth-wrapped glasses, eating with one's hands instead of crockery, miming and mouthing wedding toasts, the wedding band playing silently and a chucklesome message-passing skit, et.al., until a final moment of liberation that sounds their death knell, the authority is as good as his words. That theatrical kicker (embellished with a surreal touch), to some degree, negates the film's prior effort of ingenuity by veering into an easy route to meet its prefigured perdition and its wraith-of-the-past coda. An anomaly repulsing the post-Cold War ethos, SILENT WEDDING, although errs on the side of its own militancy, lands on its feet in its grassroots advocacy and comedic appeal.

This is a comment dedicated to setting things straight about the way this movie was filmed.It is the very first movie directed by Horatiu Malaele,please try to keep that in mind before watching it and complaining about some inconsistencies in the story line.I would very much like to see if Spielberg or Hitchcock did better in their first movies.It is not a masterpiece,nor the best description of the period, granted,but it is touching and the characters manage to grow on you if you just give this movie a chance.The story is simple,placed in a period that is not as well known of the communist period in Romania,after the WW2,when Russian troops still occupied the country.The movie begins with a present day filming crew that wants to make a movie about the paranormal activities reported in a village.The village mayor takes them to the site where these reports occur and on the way he begins to tell the story of what had happened there a long time ago.The movie flashes back to 1950 and presents the everyday lives of the people living there and,in particular,the lives of Mara and Iancu,two youngsters that decide to get married.The rest of the movie presents what problems they encounter on their wedding day.I was particularly impressed with the movie because of the stories my grandfather told about this period and the fact that this movie presents several aspects that coincide with what he said.I'll give it a 9 because it is a good first movie for a new director and the story is well written and the characters perform true to life.

For me this movie was of a great impact. I left the cinema and have not been able to say a word for more than 15 minutes. I was fascinated. It gave me a deep, profound feeling of genuine art, with incredible complex features gathered together in these 90 minutes of displayed images. A lot of meaning - I am sure for non-Romanians has not the same amount of meaning - and an authentic way of touching the most sensitive parts of the Romanian people, with humor on the most critical aspects of the most absurd time, the communist time of Romania. Malaiele is a great artist, but this film is his masterpiece. I highly recommend you to watch this movie. It is not just a movie, it is a lifetime experience.

This is maybe the best movie I have seen. It made me get an IMDb account to rate it 10 stars. I don't care about technical judgments about this movie. It's a Romanian emotional roller-coaster which pictures our recent history in a tragical and comical frame. It's one of the few movies I have ever watched at the cinema where at the end of which lots of people applauded. Romanians are recognizing themselves in the story and they find coherence in their identity and this makes the movie a masterpiece and a great service to the people of this country.One more thing that I appreciate in this movie is a reparation done within the history of the subjective experience. People from the village were at best ignoring communists and poking fun of them if they were not hating them. Nobody was happy to give away their land and village men knew what communism can bring, since they saw it with their own eyes when they fought on the Eastern front.Most people hated communism and they tried to live a normal life in silence, just like it happens in the movie. Humor was maybe the best survival resource.I live in Romania and I know from personal experience and thorough study what Russians did bring under the name of communism. I don't try to convince anyone that the so called communism was criminal and implemented locally with the help of the weakest links (like in the movie), low educated people with low morals, since there is enough literature today for anyone that has any doubt. Of course, as somebody mentions here, Romanians too did their horrible crimes on the Eastern front, but this does not mean that what the people like the ones in the movie endured, did any kind of humane justice. The people that fought on the Eastern front are a good source, since they were regular soldiers, not vicious criminals and even if they were vicious criminals, they could anyway still have seen the "benefits" that "communism" has brought to Russia.I understand why some people consider it propagandistic, but in my view this is a good artistical work upon the subjective experience and life of ordinary Romanians in 1953.