Just a very odd movie! A sometime film, within a film, based on true circumstances, but feeling very artificial and contrived. Closer to the Moon is a Romanian production with a Romanian director helming a cast of mainly British and American actors who speak English. Many of the scenes are filmed indoors which almost begs the question of why locate the production in Romania anyway. The answer probably is tax breaks, but as I said earlier, this alone serves to heighten the unnaturalness of this admittedly deliberately absurdist take on historical events.
The actual events really do sound crazily sad with 5 Jewish mid-level Romanian communists deliberately concocting a fiasco of a bank robbery in 1959 to protest the Soviet encouraged, anti-Semitic purges. After being caught and convicted they were forced to take part in a recreation of their "crime", as a propaganda warning to others, who may be of a similar mindset.
Closer to the Moon has a certain comic dark element to it, without it ever really being particularly humorous. Similarly, it fails to even have pretentions to drama and/or suspense. We know what's going to happen and all the many flashbacks and (sometimes confusing) flashbacks inside flashbacks serve to do is to delay what we know will be the inevitable. It's for this reason too, that it is difficult to identify with any potential heroes, as heroes generally don't engage in probable suicidal missions just for the fun of it, or to make a point, which is what we're asked to do here. I've always been a fan of Vera Farmiga and versatile character actor Mark Strong, but they are just wasted here playing Romanian caricatures of later 1960's American Yippie types.
For an improbably largely true story, we never really are convinced of the motives behind the actions of this tiny resistance cell. I feel a more authentic, persuasive argument may have been made by writer/director Nae Caranfil by at least filming in Romania with a largely Romanian cast. As it stands, Closer to the Moon suffers from a lack of narrative cohesion, which is only exacerbated by its very uneven dramatic and comedic tone.
The actual events really do sound crazily sad with 5 Jewish mid-level Romanian communists deliberately concocting a fiasco of a bank robbery in 1959 to protest the Soviet encouraged, anti-Semitic purges. After being caught and convicted they were forced to take part in a recreation of their "crime", as a propaganda warning to others, who may be of a similar mindset.
Closer to the Moon has a certain comic dark element to it, without it ever really being particularly humorous. Similarly, it fails to even have pretentions to drama and/or suspense. We know what's going to happen and all the many flashbacks and (sometimes confusing) flashbacks inside flashbacks serve to do is to delay what we know will be the inevitable. It's for this reason too, that it is difficult to identify with any potential heroes, as heroes generally don't engage in probable suicidal missions just for the fun of it, or to make a point, which is what we're asked to do here. I've always been a fan of Vera Farmiga and versatile character actor Mark Strong, but they are just wasted here playing Romanian caricatures of later 1960's American Yippie types.
For an improbably largely true story, we never really are convinced of the motives behind the actions of this tiny resistance cell. I feel a more authentic, persuasive argument may have been made by writer/director Nae Caranfil by at least filming in Romania with a largely Romanian cast. As it stands, Closer to the Moon suffers from a lack of narrative cohesion, which is only exacerbated by its very uneven dramatic and comedic tone.