Review: Ryna

Some actors are compelling whatever they do, and young Doroteea Petre, the lead of director Ruxandra Zenide’s first feature, a Romanian-Swiss co-production, has something greater than beauty: the kind of charisma that demolishes any story being told around the fact of her features. (This kind of magic is rarer than you know; it goes beyond beauty or sensuality, her wet, intent brown eyes, her voluptuous, androgynous features: sumptuous mouth, lovely full nose. It’s presence.) In a tiny town in the Danube delta, Ryna is a 16-year-old who’s been raised as a boy by her father who runs a gas station, who’d wanted a son instead, but despite hair cropped to her skull and the oily clothes of a worker, her burgeoning womanhood aggravates other swinish men in the town beyond her father, including the mayor. Other suitors, including a postman and a visiting French anthropology student are kinder. But confrontation with her father and her sexuality are inevitable. It’s an intriguing parable for the cultural compromises that occurred after the fall of Communism. Zenide’s patient, lovingly composed visual style is a suitable complement to Petre’s performance. (Zenide escaped from Bucharest to Switzerland before the 1989 fall of the Ceaucescu regime.) 94m. (Ray Pride)