‘Uppercase Print’ Review: Between the Lines

“Uppercase Print” opens with a fragment of a quote from the philosopher Michel Foucault: “the resonance I feel when I happen to encounter these small lives reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down.” The film, a rousing, form-bending new feature by the Romanian auteur Radu Jude, rails at the tyrannical potential of language — particularly when backed by government power — to suffocate people’s freedoms.

The movie braids together two accounts of life under the dictatorial regime of Nicolae Ceausescu: a filmed play about the 1981 investigation of a teenager who graffitied slogans about democracy and workers’ rights in the city of Botosani; and advertisements, educational programs and newsreel footage from state-sanctioned Romanian television of the same era.

A queasy sense of party-line artifice haunts both the theatrical performance and the TV footage, which the film’s archival opening telegraphs strikingly. Three well-dressed presenters praise Ceausescu’s Romania enthusiastically, until a teleprompter malfunction renders them awkward and speechless. Without its scripted cues, they have no idea what to say.

The play, originally written for the stage in 2013 by Gianina Carbunariu, repurposes text from the files of Romania’s Communist-era secret police. Actors read these lines with deadpan intonation, making vivid the dehumanizing effects of bureaucratic jargon. “Reforming the objective” is a dry euphemism for the repression of dissidents; “youth protection” is code for surveillance.

Jude’s genius lies in his ability to turn these words against themselves — to render them absurd through canny juxtapositions of text and image, documentary and fiction. And if the film draws on the past, it’s as a warning for the present: A closing exchange about Ceausescu-era phone-tapping slyly references Cambridge Analytica.

Uppercase Print
Not rated. In Romanian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. In theaters.