“Milk Teeth is another strong entry into an already impressive canon of Romanian cinema.”

Alina (Lara Maria Alexandra Comanescu) is annoyed with her sister Maria (Emma Ioana Mogos). It was Maria who was supposed to take out the trash, not Alina. Now she has to walk two blocks to the dumpster, and it is not fair. Maria watches her sister turn the corner. She will never see her sister again.

In Milk Teeth, the follow-up feature to his breakthrough film To the North, Romanian director Mihai Mincan goes to a period and frame of mind he knows first hand. Setting his film at three moments close to and after the ousting and death of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989, Mincan, who was born at the dawn of the 1980s, can identify with the mindset of a pre-teen at a watershed moment in Romanian history. Mincan is part of an emerging generation of filmmakers of a certain age that meant they went through this moment consciously but before reaching adulthood (another example is Bogdan Muresanu, whose The New Year That Never Came was in Venice’s Orizzonti section last year). They set their films accordingly in the period of communism’s death throes, in order to examine a nation’s psyche in flux, especially that of Romania’s younger generations. On the surface, Milk Teeth is a coming-of-age film that sees a young girl trying to make sense of the world in the aftermath of losing a sibling, but on a macro level the film is an allegory for a generation’s confusion after the transition from living in a rigid system with no hope for a future to a period in which a possible future has turned into disillusion. But even at its most superficial level, Milk Teeth is a strong film thanks to Mincan’s unquestionable talent to create atmosphere, and to his clear vision in shaping a character’s emotional world through the medium’s visual and aural possibilities.

In the aftermath of Alina’s disappearance, Maria’s mother (an outstanding Marina Palii) refuses to believe that her dear daughter will never return. No matter how much the police, given a face through the lead investigator (István Téglás, looking every bit what you think an ’80s communist police investigator would have looked like), try to lower her expectations. Maria’s father (Igor Babiac) turns inward and closes himself off from what happened, but her mother hounds the neighbors and consults a medium for any clue about what became of her girl. Her other girl tries to make sense of it too. She plays with her friends, but something has changed. She was supposed to take out the trash. Is it her fault, was she the one who should have disappeared?

This period of confusion in Maria’s life forms the long second act of the film, set two months before Ceaușescu’s fall, and there is a notable shift in the way she and the world around her are framed. Cinematographer George Chiper, who returns to work with Mincan after his exquisite lensing and lighting in To the North, employs a hand-held image that stays close to the skin and low in depth reminiscent of his work in his co-directed and award-winning title Immaculate. Combined with the sound design by Nicolas Becker (also returning), a muffled soundscape that separates Maria’s inner world from the (to her) lifeless world outside now that her sister is gone, this creates a sense of intimacy but also lack of contact, as if Maria is grappling in the dark. That dark manifests itself visually a couple of times in the film, and never associated with good things. It can be seen as Maria needing to face the fact that her sister will never return, but it is also metaphoric for the unclear future that Romania was taking a leap of faith towards at this point in time.

After that leap is taken, in the third act, clarity is back in Maria’s life, and it’s not great. Her parents have separated (symbolic of a country torn apart), her sister turns out to be one of many children who have disappeared (another metaphor for a lost generation), and life hasn’t fulfilled the promise of the revolution. Set to the sombre tones of Pet Shop Boys’ Suburbia, the song itself conveying a tension in a young generation, some broken walnut shells and a look through the window at her father provide Maria with closure and end the film on a hopeful note, as Romania takes its first uncertain steps towards ‘freedom’, whatever that entails. The scene also provides the viewer with a sense of closure on a film that tracks what should have been a triumphant moment but instead is mired in uncertainty. Mincan proves once again that his storytelling abilities are not limited to just the script, but that he is the total package, and Milk Teeth is another strong entry into an already impressive canon of Romanian cinema.