Weird! I would have never pictured Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson portraying two stone cold killers who chopped up their victims and torched the parts. The movie, based on a true story is highly disturbing and the only reason that I would want to say anything about it is one line spoken by a character in the movie. Sorina Luminiţa played by Bar Paly, is actually patterned on the very real Sabina Petrescu. So, in the movie Sorina is talking about why she lost the Miss Romania contest, ending up with a runner-up position. She blames the judges and her statement was ‘I don’t know why that bitch won, my pizda is better than her pizda!’ That’s it, I think (the pizda was absolutely there a Romanian word in an English sentence, but I’m only paraphrasing the rest.)
I had actually come up with one of my silly story ideas independently as well, long before I saw the movie. To start with, pizda in Romanian means cunt. Romanians like to curse a lot and the most popular one is ‘Dute’n pizda mati!’ meaning ‘Get into your mother’s cunt!’ I thought it would be funny if there was a square in Bucharest named ‘Piazza Pizda Mati ‘ and I used it in one of my short stories. Last month, one of my cousins was a bit down and somewhat out so trying to cheer her up I wrote a whole story that explains how all of that came to be. It is the first story that I ever wrote in Romanian which is one of my two original languages (I grew up speaking Hungarian in the house and Romanian in the street.) She liked it and I crack myself up every time I re-read it. An English version will appear in my forthcoming collection of short stories ‘A Closer Look’ but for anyone who speaks Romanian here’s a link to the original: Piaţa Pizda Măti