Romanian filmmaker Marius Olteanu (“Monsters.”) is readying his sophomore feature, “We Won’t Get Old Together,” a pandemic-set drama about a man struggling to rebuild his life from the ground up when everything around him comes crashing down. Olteanu is presenting the film this week in the Works in Progress program of the Transilvania Intl. Film Festival.
“We Won’t Get Old Together” tells the story of Radu, an unemployed architect who finds himself at a crossroads amid the stultifying stillness and uncertainty of Bucharest during the pandemic. Caught between two relationships and facing a potentially life-threatening diagnosis, the 40-year-old must make choices that he’s been putting off for far too long.
Speaking to Variety in Transilvania, Olteanu described the film as “a slo-mo journey towards an unavoidable future” that is “scary yet intense, provoking yet filled with a constant need to connect and understand.”
“I also wanted this to be a journey where dreams, feelings, images and words — lots of words and ideas — slowly blur into a riddle about life itself,” he said. “How do we connect and when do we part ways with the ones who, at some point, were fragments of the core definition of our life?”
At the center of the film is Radu, a struggling architect described by Olteanu as “a human museum of broken dreams” who has been putting off a long-planned move to Lisbon, where he’ll be reunited with his long-term partner, Gabi. In the interim, he finds comfort with a younger lover in Bucharest, even as his career is stalled and the future grows increasingly uncertain. The situation is complicated when Radu suddenly finds himself confronting a potentially serious illness but is too scared to face the test results that could determine his fate.
For Olteanu, the character of Radu taps into many of the fears he himself has dealt with on the cusp of middle age. “Forty is an interesting place for a man. It’s that point where you have a life and a history behind you, and at the same time, you realize that what’s following might not be as interesting and as intense as what you’ve experienced,” he says. “[Radu] is at a point where nothing is working, and he’s wondering what he’s going to do with the rest of his life.”
When he began writing the script in 2022, “I was speaking from a place that I was at, too,” the director adds. “You can postpone things, but not forever. At some point, you need to make a decision.”
“We Won’t Get Old Together” is Olteanu’s first feature since 2019’s “Monsters.” premiered in the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum strand, where it won the Tagesspiegel Audience Award. In a glowing review, Variety’s Jessica Kiang praised the “remarkable debut,” describing the “powerful, minutely observed three-part study of a loving marriage threatened by socially taboo and mutually painful revelations” as “wise, compassionate, surprising.”
Olteanu is again confronting social taboos with his latest — this time, around homosexuality, which the director said many Romanians are willing to tolerate “as long as it’s kept between the walls of your apartment.” That belief — along with the conceit of pandemic lockdowns — provides a narrative framework for the film, which is largely set inside three apartments in Bucharest.
“Three apartments, three closed spaces, three lives, one thread that connects them — Radu’s presence, the way he captures, reimagines, confronts and finally abandons reality,” Olteanu said. “This film is a journey through compromise and unfulfilled dreams, through fear and cowardice, and above all, a story about the need to feel safe and loved in a world that seems to be falling apart.”
“We Won’t Get Old Together” is written and directed by Olteanu and produced by Oana Giurgiu, of Bucharest-based Point Film. It’s co-produced by Martine Vidalenc of French production outfit Midralgar Films and boasts a star-studded roster of below-the-line talent, with sound design by Alexandru Dragomir (“12:08 East of Bucharest,” “Police Adjective”), sound mixing by Bruno Ehlinger (“Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” “Cemetery of Splendor”), color grading by Andu Radu (“Fjord,” “The President’s Cake”) and VFX by Thierry Delobel of France’s Reepost (“Bacurau”).
The Transilvania Intl. Film Festival runs June 12 – 21.
