From the director and the producers of the internationally acclaimed WHITE PALMS (selected for the Cannes’ Quinzaine des Realisateurs and the Los Angeles AFI Film Festival, winner of the the Grand Prize at the Hungarian Film Festival and subsequently invited to the Munich, Pusan, Thessaloniki, Toronto and Warsaw International Film Festivals), BIBLIOTHEQUE PASCAL is a journey of both the mind and the body.
Young and beautiful Mona, scraping a scant living for herself and her little daughter, is duped into accompanying her father as he travels from Transylvania to Germany for life-saving surgery. Leaving her daughter with a reluctant aunt, Mona sets off on a journey that will take her to the shadowy world of sexual slavery, to Bibliotheque Pascal - a debauched brothel where prostitutes are forced to act the parts of literary characters – characters who don’t always survive past the end of their dialogue - a world where anyone from the most respectable to the most depraved can fulfill their fantasy, and where fairytales can come true if you can afford the price.
I wrote Mona’s story for the first time in a short story 5 years ago. In those days I was living in a Romanian city, where each day I was astonished yet again by this strange Balkan world, where gypsies’ horses freeze outside in minus 30 degree cold, where the Orthodox priest drives a black Audi and distributes blessings or curses for geese, eggs, or sums of money. This is a world where police can be bribed with a packet of pudding mix, where miracle workers and fortune tellers advertise themselves in the papers, where Hungarians, gypsies, Romanians, Armenians, Germans, Tartars by the sea, Turks, and Rusyns all live together. It’s a place where Dutch people come to buy land, where ethnic Hungarians flee to Hungary, and Romanians move to countries where people speak Romance languages similar to Romanian. And it is from here that young women and children are hauled off to Italy, Spain, Germany, France, and Great Britain. The story of the young woman lured abroad to become a sex slave was told to me by the buffet girl in a theater, who traveled the same road as Mona does in the film.
Before sitting down to write the screenplay, I began a sociological investigation, to see the story’s social background more clearly. Statistics reaching back several years show that among European countries, Romania has the highest number of emigrants and that they mostly choose England as their final destination. These two countries represent Europe’s two poles. These two points – distant both culturally and geographically – constitute either end of the continent’s migratory map. Despite the accession to the European Union, the situation has hardly changed.
Certain scenes happened either to the buffet girl, to me, or close acquaintances; other motifs I read about in the papers and complemented them with the help of my imagination. I’ve thought it over a thousand times and in my personal opinion, you cannot extinguish basic problems, no matter where you escape to in the world. The problem and its solution are within and not in the environment. You drag it along with you on the plane, the train, from east to west, west to east; the hope that a change in scenery will generate an inner change is only illusion. The fantasy, the myth of the western world, wears quickly off, and we come to realize that bad weather is bad weather and a bill is a bill wherever you are.
The aspect that truly interested me in Mona’s story is this perpetual conflict straining between her inner self and the world around her. My film is not about a victim. Mona is the director of her own life, and it is her responsibility to choose from among possible alternatives. For this reason I would like the word “responsibility” to appear beside the word “victim,” because the story of a victim who is lured into prostitution and forced to be a sex slave is in itself a topic that attracts clichEs like an ebonite rod does a silk shirt. This subject has been adapted countless times, resulting in both good and poor renderings; if it was only for the story, I doubt this film should add to the existing list. I feel that through Mona’s tale, I’m indirectly talking about myself and others who seek partners, friends, and love, about people who long for work that can be done with joy and pays well too; people who are unsure of how to manage their future and should be feeling responsibility for their actions; those who are prone to blame outer circumstances, others, the government, God, or whoever, for all their bad choices or an unfortunate turn of events.
Pascal’s Bibliotheque is a segment of the outside world, where Mona’s final and fateful trial begins and ends; the place is interesting in itself because of its documentary quality. After all, a myriad of similar and even more bizarre nightclubs exist in the world. But for me, the metaphoric overtone is just as important, which indirectly targets its own subculture: the sated western (and nowadays, not only western) intelligentsia whose deadened sensors must be stimulated in overdrive; those who serve these people: the deceitful and empty-headed film directors, writers, and artists who sell their talent to boost their careers, who manipulate the extremes to gain success; and the “art-business” that sucks up more and more talent, steers instinctively good thinking in the wrong direction, forcing it to the sidelines, and completely destroying the pure intentions of true culture. This is what they/we sell under the heading of culture, disguised as art: unfortunate prostitutes forced onto the wrong road, fake gems, carnival trash, all expensively and nicely wrapped. This is why it is important for me to show Pascal’s Bibliotheque as a club catering to the most refined and sensitive tastes, a place where the patrons are not truck and taxi drivers or sailors, but an establishment frequented by top intellectuals who are filled to the brim with everything, but still feel eternally lacking and lonely. This is a metaphoric junction, an emblem of the swift degree of inflation in art and culture.
I doubt there is a film in which an object, picture, sentence, or scene - intentionally or accidentally - would not rise to an exceptionally rich dimension of interpretation, to the level of metaphors, where the audience imagines a meaning beyond their simple material quality. There will obviously be scenes like this in my film. There will be scenes I can explain and ones I never expect anyone to analyze in this or that way. I could write these down, talk about them, analyze these pictures or scenes, but I might be depriving them of their essence or mystery. I believe that the real desire to tell a story lives inside you only until you are able to preserve these enigmas.
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