Synopsis
Adalbert’s Dream is a black comedy based on a real story happened in a Romanian communist factory in the 80’s. A work accident is re-enacted, but the re-enacting becomes a new accident: the worker playing the victim gets his hand cut as well.
The film action unfolds over a short span of time, 2 hours of the main character’s life: Iulica (Julian) Ploscaru. He is a married middle-aged engineer, with two children, who works in the Labor Protection Department (HRM nowadays) in a big communist factory.
It’s the 8th of May 1986 - the anniversary day for the Romanian Communist Party. A day celebrated with pomp, hypocrisy and fear by all the Romanian factories of those times. Besides this political connotation, the day is only two weeks away from the Chernobyl explosion. But most important for Romanians, this is the day when the football team Steaua Bucharest has won the Champions League (for the first and last time in the Romanian football history)!
As our protagonist is a football lover, he is full of enthusiasm and positive energy, under the influence of the game from the night before. It seems that it would be a perfect day for him.
He just wants to see the football match once again with his Department colleagues in a more relaxed atmosphere. But the video recorder is not allowed by the communist regime, so anyone who uses it is a possible enemy. Iulica is determined to elude the legal/political rules and take the video recorder to the factory.
He doesn’t know that in the next 2 hours his life will turn into an absolute nightmare, even worse than Chernobyl. But that is not because of the video recorder sneaked into the factory, of course!
In the 2 hours that we’ll follow the main character, we will witness him through multiple personal stories as frames to our main story. Although he privately shuns the political rules, Iulica is fully involved in the festivities dedicated to the Party. He is the author of two propaganda films (reconstitutions) about work protection: a fictitious one: “Adalbert’s Dream” and a documentary: “The Terrible Work Accident and Its Consequences in the Life of Comrade Lidia Spataru”, the unethical documentary on his lover. He will present both of them at the festivities. Although the intended meaning of these films is serious and political, they are actually looking obviously more like hilarious and cynical surrealist art. Of course, that makes the communist management persecute all his Department colleagues.
Moreover, Iulica convinces two workers not to attend the festivities in order to make for him special designed kitchen knives (by the way, the factory is producing tanks). He wants to give the knives as a bribe for one of his son’s teachers. One of the workers, Croitoru (Taylor), gets his hand cut in the tools machine. The other worker brings the horrible news of the accident in the festivity hall. While everybody gets ready to re-enact the accident in front of the camera, Iulica wants to conceal that he was the main reason why the workers didn’t attend the festivities, so he asks to play the victim to quickly get it over with. He strives to be as natural as possible, but exaggerates and gets his own hand cut in the machine.
While the film opens enthusiastically with the glorious football match Steaua Bucharest-Barcelona and the thrilling penalties defended by the Romanian goalkeeper, it ends with an almost surreal story told by Lidia. She has written for Iulica a letter, but asked him to open it later that day. He tried to read it several times, but got it only partially. It told the story of a fat fox trying to eat hens in a backyard. The man who owns the hens catches the fox, but the animal struggles and hits its head against the edge of the coop. While dragged back and forth by the man, the wound in its head gets larger and the fox manages to leap out of its own skin and flee. The film ends with this strange vision of the wounded furless fox running towards the woods. It is an allegory of all the accidents happened in the film as well as of the wounded life of people living in those days.