Genre Comedy

THE SOFA (2017)

Item: THE SOFA
Rating: 3.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★ — THE SOFA (2017)

Moldova is not a country that regularly registers on most film fans' radar, which makes any opportunity to spotlight its cinema all the more worthwhile. The country's film output is modest by European standards, shaped in part by limited resources and a production infrastructure that is still finding its footing decades on from the Soviet era. Short film, though, has long been a format where smaller industries can punch well above their weight, and The Sofa (2017) fits squarely into that tradition. It is a comedy short running to roughly twenty-five minutes, built around a premise that is disarmingly simple: two elderly men, faced with the age-old wedding gift dilemma, improvise in the most gloriously ill-advised way possible. What follows is a road comedy in miniature, a kind of shaggy-dog story that belongs to a long lineage of films about ordinary people doing daft things with enormous conviction. If you enjoy the kind of warm, character-led comedy that can be found in Little by Little, there is something of that same affectionate, slightly anarchic spirit at work here.

The film was directed by Iulia Puica, working within what appears to be a low-budget, independent context. Details about the production company are not publicly documented, so it is difficult to place the film within a specific studio tradition, but the filmmaking feels personal and unpretentious, which for a short comedy of this kind is generally a virtue rather than a limitation. The cast is led by Mihai Curagău and Sergiu Finiti as the two central figures, with Dana Ciobanu, Sergiu Voloc, and Vadim Cernega rounding out the ensemble. Curagău and Finiti carry the bulk of the film between them, and the chemistry between two older performers navigating a situation of their own chaotic making is the engine on which the whole thing runs. It is the kind of pairing that lives or dies on whether you believe these two men have known each other for decades, and by all accounts the casting does that quiet work without drawing attention to itself. For another flavour of what Moldovan filmmaking can offer, it is worth checking out Megdan: Between Water and Fire, a more recent production from the same country that shows a rather different side of its cinema.

The Sofa is available to watch on Vimeo, which is where most short films of this kind find their audience now, often slipping past viewers who might otherwise never seek out Moldovan comedy. It sits comfortably alongside other short-form work from the 2010s that proved a tight concept, handled with good humour and a little heart, does not need a large canvas to leave an impression. Fans of short filmmaking from that period might also want to revisit Luigi, another short from the same decade that shares some of that same economy of storytelling.

A-Z World Movie Tour Moldova https://vimeo.com/435931226?share=copy From the description alone I thought this was going to be a good short. I wasn't disappointed. It was funny, whimsical, at times touching and just downright entertaining. It could have even been a little shorter as it was bloated by some random driving shots but overall it was a really good short. There's a little ambiguity at the end as to whether or not the adventure even happened at all but I choose to believe it did.

That slight ambiguity at the end is something that has stuck with me, and I think it is one of the smarter choices the film makes. A tidier resolution would have felt less true to the ramshackle charm of everything that came before it. The pacing wobbles in a couple of places, yes, and a judicious edit would have tightened things up nicely, but for a short film made on what was clearly a very modest budget, it delivers more warmth and genuine laughs than plenty of features manage across ten times the runtime. Sometimes the best recommendation is the simplest one: it is well worth the twenty-five minutes.

Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2025-07-20

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