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Bruce Lee and the Outlaw review – brutal, beautiful portrait of a Romanian street kid | Television & radio


Some children come trailing clouds of glory. Nicu comes surrounded by a cloud of silver paint fumes, which he huffs from a plastic bag almost constantly, as do his fellow street kids and adults who are the legacy of the collapse of the communist regime in Romania. He pays for the bottles of paint, called Aurolac, by begging and – we see his bravado and tears afterwards – “sucking men off” for the leu that will buy him oblivion.

Film-maker Joost Vandebrug spent six years following Nicu as he grows from 12-year-old boy to manhood. The result is Bruce Lee and the Outlaw (PBS), a film as beautiful and tender in form as its content is ugly and brutal.

Nicu leaves the streets to go live with the homeless children and adults who shelter in the sewers and network of tunnels beneath Bucharest, built by Ceaușescu as part of a grand plan to centrally heat the city. This literal underworld is run by a man who calls himself Bruce Lee. To the police, he is a criminal kingpin whose activities include dealing class A drugs as well as supplying Aurolac to all the tunnel dwellers who depend on it. To Lee, himself, he is “a prophet, a seer.” To Nicu who is a particular favourite of Lee, he is a beloved protector and parent.

The customary distance between documentary-maker and subject is maintained – though Nicu and his gang nickname Vandebrug “Giraffe” – until he returns to find Nicu shockingly thin and unwell. He takes him to hospital, where the boy is diagnosed with HIV and tuberculosis and given a couple of months to live if he goes back to the tunnels. “I went down the wrong path,” Nicu explains.

Vandebrug stays with him in hospital but their deeper relationship seems not to affect the film, which remains compassionate but clear-eyed, loving but unsentimental, all the while retaining a slightly hallucinatory quality that evokes the unreality of Nicu’s life.

Social worker Raluca takes Nicu in when he is discharged six months later and quickly becomes a mother figure to him. But he still cannot resist the lure of tunnel life, drugs and Lee and the latter half of the film tracks the pull of the new life and the old. Nicu misses Lee and the life he knew, and revisits the tunnels. He is deeply hurt but perhaps also saved by the fact that he has been replaced in Lee’s affections by a new, younger child. It is time to grow up and make his own life.

The end of the film focuses on Nicu’s 18th birthday at Raluca’s home and intimations of peace. What kind of peace is left ambiguous: we do not see Nicu as he is now and his last voiceover – “I have many fathers and mothers, I have many brothers and sisters. This is what I wanted to say, my final words. This is what I will remember” – inevitably raises the spectre of his HIV status.

You could Google for news, of course, but I haven’t. Vandebrug’s film should be allowed to stand alone, as a portrait of one child who stands for too many.



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