The Surreal Lives of ‘Bruce Lee and the Outlaw’ in the Communist Tunnels of Bucharest

Newly released online, and currently the highest rated film on Mubi, Joost Vandebrug’s and Grain Media’s ‘Bruce Lee and The Outlaw’ is a surreal account of six years spent in Bucharest’s litteral underworld. Starting off as an eye-opening exposé of a homeless child gang’s appalling living conditions quickly veers into the personal when teenager Nicu’s health, also known as ‘The Outlaw’, worryingly declines. Part hallucinatory exploration of Bucharest’s street life and its medley of personalities, part biography of a boy denied a childhood, Vandebrug’s eye-catching picture is as raw as it is beautiful.

The film’s first act is a fascinating and unflinching first-person introduction to Bucharest’s otherworldy street life. The camera pans haphazardly from one pavement to the next before shaking into a run and dropping through a manhole as Vandebrug desperately tries to keep up with a manic group of homeless children, brushing past oblivious commuters and huffing from aurolac paint-filled plastic bags as they go. Painted in metallic aurolac from head to toe and a firm believer in the prophet Michael Jackson, it isn’t long before we’re introduced to Bruce Lee, the self-proclaimed king of the city’s soviet-era tunnel network. To the police he’s nothing more than a drug dealer, to the media he’s a mysterious and enigmatic figure, but to Nicu, he’s the man to whom he owes his nickname and the closest thing he has to a father.

It’s when Bruce Lee cobbles together a homeless shelter above ground for the summer months (the tunnels become unbearably hot) that things begin to go south. At this point fully integrated into the community and nicknamed ‘Giraffe’, Vandebrug freely films children and adults injecting heroin, playing with Bruce’s multiplying band of stray puppies and hurriedly passing handfuls of illicit cash around. Nicu is extremely skinny and for the first time Vandebrug steps in, taking him to a local hospital.

In the examination room Nicu’s high recedes and with it, so does the viewer’s thrill in discovering his strange world. At just 15, Nicu’s body is losing the fight against TB, brought on by the constant aurolac, and HIV, from injecting heroin with a used needle. Now more painfully aware of his boyish looks and his vulnerability, his case seems more desperate to us than ever. But against the odds, the generous social worker Raluca takes him in, giving him another shot at life. This also grants the second half of the film a much-needed plotline, the early lack of which is likely to put off some viewers.

Now sober but missing Bruce Lee, his frends and the carefree tunnel-life, does Nicu have the strength to build a new life for himself ?

More than a kaleidoscopic gateway to tunnel-living in Bucharest, ‘Bruce Lee and the Outlaw’ slowly grows into a tender portrait of Nicu’s difficult upbringing. Admirably, Vandebrug trumps accuracy over sentimentality throughout and comits to showing us the ugly, not just the good. Regardless, it’s impossible not to fall for the ever-smiling Nicu, as so many of the adults around him do, including Vandebrug himself.