That Trip We Took with Dad, written and directed by Anca Miruna Lazarescu

That Trip We Took with Dad, written and directed by Anca Miruna Lazarescu

Based on a true story, That Trip We Took with Dad is the kind of very good film that does not get the attention it deserves.

In some ways, this could be more enjoyable than Call Me by Your Name, Phantom Thread, Get Out or Lady Bird, all features nominated for the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture of 2017, albeit this is a matter of opinion.

The Post is preferable to That Trip We Took With Dad and probably so are the other four nominations for the most coveted prize in the film industry.

Die Reise Mit Vater takes place in 1968 an ominous period that is regrettably forgotten by so many prominent politicians in the West, from Corbyn to the much hyped socialist from across the ocean…”Bernie”.

Mihai, Emil and William Reinholtz live in the North Western part of Romania, about forty kilometers from the border with Hungary.

They belong to a community called “Svab”, German speakers brought to this land many centuries ago, in order to secure the borders, settle down and prosper, which they did with wonderful success.

One of the German speakers, descendent of these centuries old hard working, serious, honest, proud, decent people is now the president of the land and the one who has to lead the fight against what is called “The Red Plague”, an organization that traces its roots to the antiheroes, the communists in this film.

Father William is ill, albeit in some disputes along the road, as they have to push the car that has run out of gasoline and father and one of the sons incriminate each other for not having noticed the indicator for the fuel, the younger one blames the parent for being sick whenever that suited him and exaggerating the condition.

In the first few scenes, we have a clash that was and still is typical for tyrannies, China included with its abduction of supposed opponents in Hong Kong, Russia with its Plutonium and other attacks on dissidents.

Young men write some subversive graffiti on a wall and the dreaded Secret Police aka The Securitate shows up to interrogate and investigate the incident, pressuring Mihai to divulge secrets and then resorting to threats, because the officer knows him, this is not such a big town after all, and claims he had helped him.

The family has to travel abroad to get better care abroad, for nothing worked in this “Workers’ Paradise”, where medical care was next to impossible to get on account of the absence of means, medicine, equipment and indeed, anything, but also because of the generalized corruption which meant that any services, appalling as they were, had to bought with bribes, coffee, cigarettes as preferred “currency”.

The Reinholtz family reaches East Germany, a communist state, but more advanced in the Warsaw Pact, only to find themselves in the middle of a turmoil created by the Soviet invasion of the then called Czechoslovakia, later divided into the two states that are part of the EU today.

There are some humorous scenes, although the setting and the atmosphere is mostly repressive, for this is the regime that you can learn about in Animal Farm, where all animals were equal, but some animals were more equal than others and pigs ruled and controlled the game, taking all the advantages.

The police accept bribes in the form of cognac, the Romanian representative, always an apparatchik who used the so called “wooden tongue”, a language of propaganda and lies, the one still used by Russia, china, North Korea and other such unlighted territories, arrives at the place where his conationals are hosted by the German authorities.

During this period, Mihai meets with Ulrike von Syberg, who, in spite of her aristocratic name and West German passport, is so incredibly gullible as to entertain Socialist ideas and belong to a group that loves the Soviets and loathes the…Americans.

Preposterous as this is, Le Pen, Salvini and other medical cases still see Putin and others like him as heroes, whereas the latter is so enthusiastic about the Soviet Union that he called the breakdown of that monster state the worst catastrophe of the last century.

In discussions over the Prague Spring Disaster, the pro- soviet West Germans are so vacant and thick as to keep attacking…the same Americans, with that old, barbarous record – we forget what the Yankees do, but we blame the Russians, when it is also their revolution and they surely have only good intentions and on and on…

Mihai, who is now the only one left in the free world, since his brother and father had returned to their country, tries to tell his capitalist adversaries that he would like to live in their land and enjoy their freedoms, since the advertised communist paradise is not at all what Ulrike and her comrades envisage.

The latter young, handsome woman is attracted by the mysterious, different Mihai and they have sex, while contradicting each other when analyzing the benefits of the two contrasting political systems.

Meanwhile, the Secret Police abuses, beats the younger brother, Emil, like so many millions of other innocent people, in this and other countries, which is another fact that Western communist sympathizers forget:

Stalin, Mao and other such “lovely creatures” have mass murdered many more millions than the absolute monster, Hitler!

                How could those in the West that entertain communist ideas forget that?

PS: there is another humorous scene, forgotten in the first instance, in which Mihai sings a famous Russian song, only the lyrics are in Romanian and the sycophants of the Soviets enjoy it so much because they do not understand the lyrics which basically tell the invaders, villainous, terrorist Russians to stay out and…fuck off, if not in these words.