Loverboy, chronicle of a love story

The young Romanian filmmaker Catalin Mitulescu, winner of the Palme d’Or for Short Film in 2004 for Trafic, is presenting his second film, Loverboy, in Un Certain Regard. It is the story of a passionate idyll in a context of prostitution.

At the age of 20, Lucas is a handsome and seductive young man whom girls find irresistable. But the seducer uses is charms for criminal ends. Once he has hooked his prey, he forces them to join a prostitution ring that operates in the port of Constanta on the Black Sea coast. His encounter with one of his victims, the very beautiful Veli, finally brings him to question his activities and his dark side. For Lucas has fallen in love with her.

Loverboy, Catalin Mitulescu’s second feature film, is the chronicle of a love story. “A love story that is so intense that you feel like you need to destroy it. And the more this need grows, the stronger the relationship becomes,” the director explains. He was inspired to write the script for this film by his long drives along the Danube and the discovery of poor villages that dot its banks.

In Loverboy, Romanian society also emerges as a backdrop in Mitulescu’s cinema, and he highlights its fragility and its flaws, but he also wants to raise awareness. With Cum Mi-am petrecut sfarsitul lumii (The Way I Spent the End of the World), his first feature film, the director described the difficulties that Romanians faced in overcoming the Ceausescu years, by relating the daily life of a family in a poor quarter of Bucharest at the time of the fall of the dictator.
B.P.

The film will be screened at 11 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., Salle Debussy.