In California Dreamin’, the rail line from the Black Sea to the former Yugoslavia becomes the site of an international incident in a small town along the way. As cattle roam the streets and the bells of an Eastern Orthodox church lazily toll, a transport train bearing a company of U.S. marines with a NATO radar station pulls into town, bound for Bill Clinton’s “peacekeeping mission.” Set in 1999, California Dreamin’ was the only film made by Romanian director Cristian Nemescu before his death in a car accident. It’s out now on DVD.
The award-winner at Cannes is yet another fine example of recent Romanian filmmaking and a minor, incomplete masterpiece among dark cinematic fables of war. Nemescu apparently died before completing the project; there are some abrupt, lurching transitions and the story might have benefited from editing—but not too many edits! Lengthy and unhurried, California Dreamin’ becomes a richly detailed portrait of a community at odds with itself and the strangers who only make things worse.
Armand Assante stars as Capt. Jones, a tin-pot Patton on a tight schedule for delivering the radar station. His rigid timetable is stopped in its tracks when the town’s stationmaster halts his train for lack of customs documents. Neither bluster nor bribery will sway him. The black and white flashbacks to the village’s first encounter with the U.S. military, in the form of World War II air raids, gradually reveals the stationmaster’s back story.
The scheming mayor supplies much of the droll humor. He invites the marines to the town’s anniversary party, even though the fete had already been held a month earlier. The mayor manages to scrounge together refreshments and festoon the crumbling town square with crude portraits of Elvis Presley and George Washington. He even found an Elvis impersonator to sing “Love Me Tender” in heavily accented English. He thinks the presence of the Americans will somehow lure investment to the area and tries to enlist Jones in a pipedream to establish a sister city relationship with the captain’s home town of Bend, Oregon.
A touch of pathos and a sense for life’s potential for absurdity and tragedy endows California Dreamin’ with profound flashes of insight into the motivation behind human conflict.
