First of all Felicia is a tree times debut. Ozana Oancea ( Felicia) makes her debut as a film actress,Razvan Radulesu as a director and Melissa Raaf as a script writer and director. With a Mise-en-scène created in great detail and a wonderfull script,First of all Felicia deserves its place in place in the top of Romanian movies made this year. Although Felicia… is his debut film, Razvan Radulescu is not a recent revelation on the Romanian fim scene. Cowriter for a great number of Cristi Puiu’s and Razvan Munteanu’films ,Razvan Radulescu is an acknowledged value of the Romanian cinema and his debut as a director only straighttness his status.
The authentic patience of social and interhuman relationships and the mastery of unforged realism are the strong points and the ground for the success of today’s films. First of all Felicia promises to exceed even the bounderies of these premises. Razvan Radulescu’s films not only shows realities in a subtle and strong manner but also manage to make a complex themathization and give the family conflict, that otherwise would appear generic, the dept of a personal drama.
It demonstrates not only the abbility to build social types, the shortcomings, the flaws that we are so familiar with but also to distinguish the characters by building up their uniqueness.Felicia lives in Holland for 19 years and visits her parents in Romania with a conscious regularity.The film follows the entire development of a day in wich Felicia prepares to leave her parents house in Bucharest. Her sisters unseriousness,the mothers nagging,the fathers quietly affectionate nostalgia and also the incomensurable traffic in Bucharest randomly align and cause Felicia's misfortune to lose her flight. Worried that she won't reach Holland in time to pick up her son from camp and irritated by her mother's anxious and insisitent perpetual interventions, Felicia is on the werge of a breack down. Ozana Oancea makes a perfect embodiment of Felicia. Blending various registers.passing successively from irritability to affection, from anger to atonement, but always wearing a very deep sadness on her face, Felicia is a character with many layers and subtleties.The film also excelss trough pshychological subtilty, it holds togheder the contradictions and ambivalence of the characters and makes it hard to soldarize exclusively with one of them. Each scene seems carrefully thought out and the long and persistent frames succefully give value to it.They give us the oppurtunity to closely observe the cromatic of the frames, the scenic backdrops and subtle changes of expression on the faces of the characters.The film manages to build a remarkable density supplied pattiently in small and repetitive portions.The relationship between Felicia and her mother is boiling from the beginning but only towards the end it fires up when Felicia's criticism and frustration that have until then been tempered, erupt vulcanically.The scene is probably an inflection point of the story, which manages above all to give an unexpected depth and an indivudualized frame to the drama which otherwise we would risk to consider a standardized version of a very familiar conflict between mother and daughter.