Cannes Review: Corneliu Porumboiu's Surprising, Delightful, Prize-Winning 'The Treasure'

Aptly named and drolly executed, leading to a transcendently funny, endearing and unexpected finale, "The Treasure" confirms Corneliu Porumboiu as the joker in the Romanian New Wave pack. The "12:08 East Of Bucharest" and "Police, Adjective" director is no stranger to grafting a layer of mordant, defiantly hangdog Eastern European humor onto the social realist critiques that his peers approach in a more straight-on manner, but with his newest film, which deservedly won a prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, he takes that impulse further, into strange, new, almost fairytale territory. It's a bizarre mix of opposites: insistently grounded (often literally -- there is a lot of digging) but eventually whimsical; initially wearying but so very, very worth an investment of patience. It may not be as biting a satire as his aforementioned titles, and no doubt Romanian New Wave purists will find it frivolous wish-fulfillment in comparison to the dour fatalism...