Scriptwriter Matt Drake has reportedly said he based the film on his own experiences on a trip he took to Eastern Europe after the death of his own mother. Shia LaBeouf plays the hopelessly naïve American traveler, Charlie Countryman, sees visions of the recently dead who tell him to visit Bucharest and carry out other missions which the hapless Charlie obeys. LaBeouf manages to make the unlikely character of Charlie romantic and appealing even saddled with the totally eccentric plot.
Charlie is an American who decides to travel to Bucharest after his mother dies of cancer and appears in a vision telling him to go there to free his mind. On the plane Charlie meets a Romanian taxi driver, Victor played by Ion Caramitru, who also dies and subsequently appears to Charlie in a vision charging Charlie with delivering a “gift” to his daughter Gabi. When Charlie meets Gabi, it’s love at first sight on his side although not on hers. Gabi plays the cello at the Bucharest Opera but this is no sensitive young girl but the hard nosed, ex-wife of the boss of a Bucharest drug cartel.
Charlie is determined to save Gabi although it is not clear if she actually wants to be saved and he is plunged into the seamy underworld of the Romanian capitol. Charlie becomes embroiled with Gabi’s gangster ex-husband Nigel played by Mads Mikkelsen who is looking for a missing videocassette that Victor and now Gabi were connected to. Germany’s biggest star Til Schweiger plays Darko another Bucharest gangster who is also after the videocassette. With the murderous Nigel intent on snuffing out Charlie our hero goes on the run in a journey that takes us through strip clubs, grubby hostels and other American clichés of the perceived underbelly of the East. Along the way Charlie encounters Harry Potter exile Rupert Grint as a British backpacker who has indulged in prohibited substances.
The film was shot in Romania and the results are not any Romania that most visitors or Romanians will recognize and it is difficult to understand how debut director Fredrik Bond could have managed to present such a clichéd picture of the long defunct “Wild East” in this day and age. Apparently the script originally set the action in Budapest but director Bond decided to move it to Romania as he felt the country would lend itself better to the romantic landscape of the story.
Speaking at the press conference the director Bond said the wanted to give the film a feeling that would go back to the youthful days when he and other young people bought an inter-rail pass and backpacked around Europe saying he hoped it would remind people of those experiences when you lived in doorways and met strangers on a train.
The film is mainly a love story and it has a romantic, comic, fairy tale quality and an appealing musical score that somehow almost carries us along despite its shortcomings.
Credits:
Director: Fredrik Bond
USA 2013
Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Evan Rachel Wood, Mads Mikkelsen, Til Schweiger, Rupert Grint, James Buckley
