by Clarke Fountain
synopsis
This black-and-white Rumanian film tells two bleak stories about absent love. In the first, a quarry worker who has lost her husband and her son struggles to support her ailing daughter. When the daughter dies, she sells the horse that enabled her to do her job to pay for the funeral. In the second, an army deserter joins up with a gypsy musician to play at a wedding. The unwilling bride who has been forced to marry the groom, a local landowner, runs off with the gypsy musician. Unable to find the couple, and lacking anyone else on whom to vent their frustrations, the landowner and his friends beat the deserter to death.
