Mariana (Ioana Iacob), the heroine of this fictional, reality-saturated film, would agree. A theater artist who shares the name of a well-known poet, Mariana is planning an ambitious, provocative public pageant reconstructing a massacre that took place in Odessa in 1941. She envisions a show that will be more than just a dress-up opportunity for military buffs. She wants to confront spectators and participants with uncomfortable facts about Romanian complicity in the Holocaust, and to challenge deeply rooted myths of national innocence.
The slaughter — mostly of Jews from territories that are now part of Moldova and Ukraine — was overseen by Marshal Ion Antonescu, leader of Romania’s fascist government. Antonescu, executed in 1946 for war crimes, underwent a partial rehabilitation after the 1989 revolution, recalled by some as a staunch patriot whose fervent anti-communism led him into an unfortunate alliance with Nazi Germany. Both Mariana and Jude use their chosen art forms to push back against such revisionism. The movie and the theater piece within it insist that Antonescu (whose words are the source of the film’s title), was a ferocious anti-Semite and anti-Roma racist, and that his army’s killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other innocents can’t be blamed on Germany, the Soviet Union or the fog of war.
Until its devastating final scenes, the way “I Do Not Care” makes its points is discursive rather than dramatic. Its action consists mostly of a series of arguments between Mariana and others — all men — who think they know more (or at least show that they care less) about Romanian history than she does.
Cast members complain about her ideas and techniques, threatening to quit if she doesn’t cater to their sensitivities. Her lover, a married airline pilot, tunes out her passionate disquisitions on truth and justice. An official from the government agency funding her project subjects her to condescending lectures about other historical abominations. He pauses in these grandiloquent flights of whataboutism to threaten to cancel the performance, and also to ask her out for a drink.
Iacob is energetic and persuasive in her portrayal of an embattled intellectual, defending the integrity of her vision against doubters and peppering her conversation with references to Hannah Arendt, Ludwig Wittgenstein and various homegrown literary luminaries. Her distrust of authority also has a feminist dimension. As in other recent Romanian films, this one casts an exasperated eye on a society where power and male pomposity go hand in hand. Mariana’s personal, emotional and sexual struggles play out in the background, but they’re clearly connected to the critical spirit of her work.
There is an unmistakable idealism in her confrontational zeal, a faith in the power of art as a vehicle of moral enlightenment. If people see the truth about what happened in the past, their consciences will be awakened in a way that might help prevent history’s horrors from repeating. Jude honors this belief even as he views it with mordant, fatalistic irony. Mariana insists that empathy, reason and the acceptance of complexity can be powerful political forces, even as her work illustrates, in ways she can’t entirely control, that cruelty, ignorance and tribalism may be stronger still.
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‘I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians’
Not rated. In Romanian, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.