AllMovie

In Romania, as in other communist countries, certain kinds of intellectuals were adopted in a fashion resembling the way people adopt house pets. They were fed, housed, and cossetted without any regard for their capacity to perform any useful function. In this movie, Stefan Sirbu (Claudiu Beont) is such an intellectual, a novelist who actually wrote a pretty decent first novel. He has been working on his next novel for quite a few years since then. Rather, he has been having writer's block on his next novel, and has been colorfully anguishing about that. No matter: the government feeds him anyway. So he sits around his apartment wearing only his underwear, being beastly to his wife and daughter, and carrying on an affair. After the fall of the Ceausescu government, however, he is no longer cherished and cossetted. Somehow he manages to throw off the rest of his clothing, and receives fresh inspiration to write, despite (or perhaps because of) his changed circumstances..