‘Aferim!’ — a Romanian film, funny in two ways

“Aferim!” — the ironic title means Bravo! in Romanian — is funny in both senses of the word, both amusing and very odd.

Based on an amalgam of true stories, the movie presents an essentially simple situation.

The place is the Wallachia region of Romania, and a constable (Teodor Corban) has been given an assignment by a wealthy landowner to capture and return an escaped slave.

In between towns, the father and son talk, or rather the father talks, in long monologues punctuated by aphorisms, only some of which make sense (“When drunk, give no gifts and do no harm”).

At one point, the father and son help a priest on the road, who launches into an insane, heated diatribe about why Gypsies are bad but Jews are worse, because Jews, according to him, are not even human.

The monologue is so extreme it’s like something out of Monty Python, but what compounds the absurdity is that the constable listens to the priest while giving no indication that these are bizarre opinions.

Along the way, the movie calls attention to a bit of history that most people don’t know, that for centuries the Romani people, known as Gypsies, were slaves in Eastern Europe.

The movie establishes a quality of history by filming in black and white and shooting from a distance, so as to emphasize the broad picture.