Twenty-eight year old Manu (Lucian Teodor Rus) is taken to a sanitarium by his merchant father Alexandru Dabija, SHADOW OF A CLOUD) where Dr. Ceafalan (Serban Pavlu, THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU) with "Pott's Disease" wherein his tuberculosis has eroded a bone in his spine, requiring him to undergo painful drainage of pus-filled fistulas and to remain bed-ridden in a body cast so as not to cause further fractures. He tries to mask his fears and entertain the doctor, staff, and his parents with shows of his intellect and storytelling. At first, he adapts a superior attitude over his more optomistic fellow patients, but soon discovers that his ward mates have found ways to enjoy themselves, and the attentions of former patient "Solange" (Ivana Mladenovic) encourage him more than ever to live life to the fullest from the confines of his bed. Director Radu Jade's follow-up to his Tarkovskian AFERIM!, SCARRED HEARTS is loosely based on the short life of Jewish-Romanian writer Emanuel "Max" Blecher (1909-1938), SCARRED HEARTS is an odd failure of a film. Told in extended long takes and long shots, the formal beauty of the compositions and production design are far more involving than the characters which the literally "distanced" approach prevents the viewer from really knowing and the performances equally difficult to assess. That would not be such a problem if the characters as depicted could be seen as extensions of Manu, but he is afforded little more emphasis beyond the visual and his character is most communicated through the interstitial text that appears between sequences.