Trouble, the crazed man of a Romanian village, walks by the house of one of the villagers. Obviously drunk, the villager invites Trouble in for a drink. Trouble knows better and wants to get away, but the villager insists and Trouble sits, like a scared dog, on the side of the road.
The drunken villager talks about his wife, who just gave birth to a boy, and then switches the conversation to the expected flood that might destroy the whole village. He insists that the walls of his house are the thickest of all houses, and that he just has to settle upstairs with his wife and wait.
Trouble, who doesn’t speak a word, is uncomfortable, especially when the villager wants him to talk about the accident that caused him to lose his mind. Sick from drinking, the villager starts beating Trouble up.
“Beat him,” a passerby shouts from the streets. “What did he do this time?”
“I caught him stealing,” the drunken villager screams while crushing the madman’s bike to pieces. “He is as stupid as a rock, but he knows how to steal!”
Trouble, the protagonist of the Romanian movie “Meekness,” is the most hated person in his village. After accidentally killing a child, Trouble lost his family and his status as the village vet, and moved into a destroyed church.
The village itself is standing still in a world full of changes. The villagers await the flood that is about to wipe out their home, and the old ladies are crying for the church to be rebuilt. Trouble spends his days cleaning the village bar, running away from a crooked police officer and keeping the company of a young boy who lost his father in a previous flood.
The relationship between Trouble (who is also referred to as “The Doc” in the movie) and the child supplies the film’s main plot. “Meekness” also deals with loss of hope, the bureaucracy in the village and the crime that rules the place.
Director Catalin Apostol tightens up the movie’s plot nicely and presents a gloomy picture of the villagers’ lives by exploring their lose of faith, their passivity towards the pending danger of the flood and their hatred towards the weakest links in their society. They attack the poor and the sick by hitting them, killing their hopes and destroying their small happiness in a reaction to the poor circumstances around them.
The movie handles the development of the characters nicely, but tends to linger on small uninteresting details. One character is shown leaving his family’s house, and we see him opening the door, closing the door, walking towards his car, getting in the car, working the car until it moves, moving away and turning. Why did we need to watch all of this? Only the director knows.
Many still shots in the movie were reused heavily, maybe because of a lack of resources, but the result was somewhat amateurish and distracted from the story.
But the skill of the main actor, who handled his role perfectly and delivered the right tone, helped “Meekness” come together. In the end, though, in spite of its potential, “Meekness” does not do justice to the story it tells. Nevertheless, it delivered its message perfectly: In a world where the purest things are the most fragile and tortured, a flood might be the only solution to start anew.
