Kapitalism: Our Secret Recipe

Romanian expatriate Alexandru Solomon's documentary offers a satirical look at how miserably his homeland has fared in the post-communist era. Manipulating archival footage, Solomon frames his film around a cheeky premise in which the ghostly presence of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed in 1989, returns to his country after two decades. Although horrified by the subsequent westernization, Ceausescu is grimly pleased that former members of his regime have prospered from using their positions at the time of the revolution as springboards to wealth and power in a system that has continued (and even worsened) the old divide between haves and have-nots under the rubric of laissez-faire capitalism. Solomon employs primitive claymation/stop-motion animation to humorously depict the ways in which state-controlled resources were usurped by members of the old nomenklatura, and also interviews a representative sample of the new Romanian millionaire's club, as well as ordinary citizens who have benefited little, if at all, from the change to democracy and free enterprise. Of course, these developments are hardly unique to Romania: one can see this crude form of crony capitalism operating in many regions of the old Soviet empire, including Russia itself, and in China, as well. But Romania serves as a telling paradigm of what has happened in numerous places after communism's collapse, and Solomon's approach—a mixture of seriousness and humor similar to that of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock—makes for a film that is both enlightening and engaging. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)