Trop Tard

Review, by Lisa Nesselson

Dumitri Costa, a young trainee prosecutor is entrusted with the investigation about the suspicious death of a Jiu Valley coal miner in today Romania. Accident or murder? Costa is being helped during his investigatlon by Alina, a good-looking young topographer engineer; it is love at first sight between them both. Two other miners are killed in a long closed down gallery. The investigation relentlessly led by Costa soon begins to bother the local authorities. The mine management dread unrest among the miners who live under the threat of the closing down of mining development. The officials strive to hush the matter up. Costa and Alina receive threats over the phone...

"So what happens when, after collective euphoria has been triggered off by the seemingly final breaking off of disasters, very rapidly some other kind of hell has spontaneously regenerated from the remains of the preceding hell? And so what when we cannot even put up the yesteryear shield - that of black humour - against this new kind of hell? What happens when terrifically imaginative, highly adaptable Evil - some recycled, revamped Evil - has overnight spawned an even fiercer society than that which had shammed dead to survive ? When the whole Communist nomenklatura has turned into a bunch of upstart people, when the mafia has taken over the yesteryear Party, when the plight awaiting the eternally poor cannot be put to become a natural reserve of orang-outangs programmable upon request ? When there is no resistance any longer - when there is nothing else but exile? When it's all too late." - Lucian Pintilie