Afacerea Protar

Afacerea Protarⁱ is a purely delightful piece of leftover flotsam. Residue. Whatever you prefer to call material left behind.

Besides the manifest documentary value of footage made at a time when horse-drawn carriages and early (always black) cars easily intermingled on sett Bucharest streetsⁱⁱ, of a time when hats had principally a functional justification in societyⁱⁱⁱ, at a time of pre-"democratic" social relationships, the Protar Affair enjoys the further benefit of having been constructed on a play by Mihail Sebastian^iv, who is quite enough of a funny^v faggot to make some collegiate chikie confront her very Fad professor because he isn't giving his due to Alexander the Great, whom she's in love with, and who meets her in her dreams^vi. Yes, that's right, the very much & amply homosexual Alexander, "reformed" and reformulated to order by the young bearer of that hole in which anything fits. In her dreams. What more need I say, indeed what more could I say ? What further could be said ? And why ?

Besides... do you think you look like Alexander Macedon ? Mai stii... ?

1. The Protar Affair, 1956, by Haralambie Boros, with Ion Iancovescu, Ion Fintesteanu, Radu Beligan. [↩]
2. And made for the purpose of being a film, a piece of cinema, constructed as best they could by people then, according to what they themselves then judged could and couldn't mean. [↩]
3. Watch the men use them to signify, with all the routined ease of a principal mechanism, well oiled and well worn through incessant practice driven by oft repeated practical necessity. [↩]
4. I don't expect you've ever heard the name, on account of how I don't expect you're cultivated in any sense. Nevertheless, I do actually prefer this Romanian Jew* of an Aldous Huxley to the other one, in a few fields.

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   * The fellow, for being born to Jewish parents in what at the time was rather an extraterritorial port, stood nevertheless more of a Romanian (in both his own subjective opinion as well as as a matter of fact) than most alive "Romanians" I've to date yet met ; and by far. [↩]

5. "anything for a joke!" [↩]
6. Zburatorul, yes, yes. [↩]