Eight Postcards from Utopia review - ads from the era when 1990s Romania embraced capitalism

If you saw it blind, with no information about its origins, Eight Postcards from Utopia might look like 70 minutes of outtakes from lost Fast Show recordings, the bits where they lampooned the TV they had watched on foreign holidays and the spoof ads they concocted.

There are no commercials for Cheezy Peaz in this documentary, a mad montage of Romanian commercials from the 1990s, after the socialist regime and its autocratic leader had been despatched, but there are ads for almost every other category of goods you can think of, from high finance to laxatives. The fun is watching what the nation’s ad agencies at the time dreamed up as suitable imagery for selling their clients’ products.

The material is grouped loosely under eight headings (no subtitles are provided, so my translations of these have to rely heavily, and probably inaccurately, on my knowledge of Latin and Italian), each constructed as a witty welter of images. In the first category, imagery from Romania’s history is deployed, from warriors on horseback to lavish period-costume banquets, there to promote everything from beer and soap powder to imports like Nokia mobiles, Shell propane gas and Konica photocopiers (here, with added monk). The film-makers then tackle ads focused on consumerism, technological innovation, magic ingredients, children and the battle of the sexes.

Pepsi, predictably, has a big presence, spliced in alongside what look like those no-budget ads for local businesses that used to pop up in small cinemas. We see commercials for the Why Not? disco, urban cowboys promoting a Bucharest fast-food joint called Sheriff's, a bargain offer on packs of hypodermics and yes, a commercial for a theme park called Dracula Park. 

There are signs of green shoots in the country’s creative industry. Especially contemporary is a clip of a speech being given to a huge audience by the late president, Nicolae Ceausescu, which is suddenly interrupted by a ringtone and a man leaving suddenly who’s talking to somebody. At which point you realise it’s a mobile phone ad. There's also an inventive ad for the whiter-than-white resutls of a detergent that makes the model's white towel disappear into the background, taking his body with it, and a campaign apparently championing modernity that features two hawkers collecting outmoded computers people seem to have thrown into the street, as if they were old clothes. 

Luxury is the name of the game now, a cheesy version of Western styles, where women in full slap and revealing frocks cosy up to tuxedoed men on velvet sofas by candlelight. Celebrities — footballers, gymnast Nadia Comaneci, tennis player Ilia Nastase — get cameos in among actors with unfashionable amounts of facial hair and obvious amateurs, like the man we see promoting some kind of financial product whose off-screen director makes him repeat his lines a dozen times, to his increasing exasperation. 

One section focuses on the sexualising of everyday activities, notably eating. Blissed out people consume frankfurters and suggestively stuff their mouths with food. Big buttocks are particularly favoured: women in itsy-bitsy bikinis are shown from behind slinking around a holiday resort; in another ad, a giant female bottom in tight white trousers fills the screen. Even using soap in the shower (pictured left) becomes orgasmic. More overt still are the sex-line ads, with women massaging their breasts or gently groaning face down in a pile of hay.

It’s long been an entertaining game to shoot down advertising’s pretensions and inanities, and that was presumably part of the aim of the film. Its director Radu Jude has previous both as a critic of contemporary Romania and as a prolific commercials director. So there is a socio-political agenda to this compilation, turning it into a showcase for the excesses of unbridled capitalism, as well as a funny take on the advertising business itself.

But there’s no point in pretending a similar compilation couldn’t be made from the UK’s advertising output in, say, the 1970s, as pent-up aspirations drove the British to want to live like 007, or at least like the suburban Americans they saw in TV shows. And our sexual services ads, still thriving here after-hours, look a lot like the ones in this film’s. Its directors in fact underscore truths about our values that many of us have ingested and no longer point accusingly at. So it’s valuable to be given another vantage point from which to scrutinise our own navels. 

It’s also fun. You can just sit back, savouring the exuberant ad for ultra-fast combine harvesters, the ones with the talking reindeer, the man who arrives home with bumper packs of scouring pads for his labouring wife to clean with, the man licking his girlfriend’s face, over which she has placed a big iced cake, as you wonder when Paul Whitehouse is going to show up.

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