(aka, Galax)
An Eighties romance movie about a robot?
I know what you are thinking, but we’re not talking about Electric Dreams.
Even if it did come out in 1984.
Nor does it seem likely that either film influenced the other. After all, not only did they both came out the same year, but one was an Independent American film, the other was made in Romania by a director whose films all have seem to have some odd, eccentric touch to them.
I first came across the Romanian director, Ion Popescu-Gopo, with his absurd wordless comedy, S-a furat o bomba. While you’d never mistake it for a classic silent comedy, it brings fast paced wacky humor together with exaggerated characters and goofy situations in a deliberately non-realist style which is closer to a live action Looney Tunes cartoon than anything else.
However, as much as I love that film, I’m not sure that I’ve watched anything else he directed. I’ve tried watching The Story of Love (which has occasionally turned up with subtitles), but I’m afraid that the fact that the entire film is sung stops me every time.
And he didn’t actually direct that many films (and most of them are children’s films). So, as you can imagine, not too many of them are readily available, not even from Russian or Eastern European sources.
It’s taken me a long time to catch up with Galax: it wasn’t high on my priority list, and, while I’ve seen a few copies of it floating around, I’ve never been able to find a set of subs.
Fortunately, my fellow online critic and science fiction fanatic, Cmaltais, has gone on a binge lately, creating subs for a lot of interesting Eastern European films, many of which have found a home here.
It’s set at a small university, where a young student named Mariana is finally returning to school after a serious illness. She’s now engaged to her doctor, and is perhaps still not ready to return, but she wants to get back to campus life again.
Her friends are all excited about the college’s latest project, a computer brain installed in a wooden robot body.
However, Gore, the rather introverted young man who programmed it, insists that it has taken on a life of its own, as if some strange alien influence has taken it over.
When she finally gets to meet Galax, Mariana is entranced by it: it is sad, thoughtful, and quotes poetry and she finds herself falling in love with it.
But then Galax tries to commit suicide…
This was one of those films where I guessed the ending long before we got there, although it does play out in somewhat unexpected ways. I’m not sure how hard Popescu-Gopo is actually trying to keep it a secret — there is a gift fairly early on which is a bit of a dead giveaway.
But perhaps it will be like the scene in The Sixth Sense which gives everything away and yet most people still don’t figure it out until Bruce Willis does.
Part of the fun here is that Popescu-Gopo himself provided the effects for the film: while Galax is probably a puppet in many scenes, he is in fact stop-motion animated much of the time, particularly when we see his hands. The work is quite impressive, although I’m not a big fan of Galax’s face. However, despite the fact that his face is basically a single, expressionless piece with no lip, facial muscle or eye movement, Galax is still extremely expressive. Most of that comes from his body language, and his rather soulful voice.
I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan of the theme music and most of the score, but that’s the only real fault I can find about this one. It’s a charming little film, a beautiful and thoughtful film.
And, despite his limited nature, Galax still manages to dominate most of the scenes he is in.
It’s definitely worth a look.
Even if it doesn’t have Lenny von Dohlen…
rivets on the poster 
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