Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s latest feature, the oddball detective story Police, Adjective, opened at the IFC Center this week, so we thought this would be a good opportunity to present his 2002 short, Gone With the Wine, which displays the same dry wit that has made the director’s features such hits on the art-house and festival circuits. Porumboiu’s films often take the form of a cosmic joke — for example, a very by-the-book cop finds himself literally confronted with the book at the end of Police, Adjective — and Wine is no different. A young man, intent on immigrating to England to get away from his constantly drunk family, takes off from his dirt-poor village one day, relieved at long last to flee the shackles of home. Needless to say, things don’t turn out as planned.
