Why is it we watch with addictive outrage You Tube videos of bigots spouting vileness at school meetings, city council forums and town hall gatherings, and yet when seen on the big screen in a fiction film with real heft, such scenes feel overblown? It’s a question many viewers will likely have during R.M.N., Cristian Mungiu’s patient, thorough excoriation of xenophobia set in a village in Transylvania where centuries of conquerors, immigrants and displaced communities have ironically created an insular society united in their hatred of Roma and anyone they consider foreign. More trenchant than the director’s previous film Graduation and more fashionably of-the-moment than Beyond the Hills (still one of his best), R.M.N. – the title stands for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance – touches on a host of issues from impotent enraged masculinity to environmental destruction, from fear of the other to Romania’s status as a second-class EU country. That makes a lot to chew on, and while the filmmaking is impeccable and the acting superb, the punch isn’t quite there. Maybe it’s our fault: maybe we’ve grown too accustomed to emboldened racists and nativist rhetoric, so when it’s presented straight, as it is here, the poison is too pure to leave an aftertaste.
Since time immemorial, Transylvania has been a linguistic and ethnic crossroads, today largely populated by Romanian and Hungarian communities with a small, tenacious group of Germans still clinging to their mother tongue. Mungiu’s decision to use all three languages, with the addition of English and French, each signaled in the subtitles with different colors, is a wise move that enriches both plot and atmosphere and is really the only way to demonstrate not just the easy linguistic flow but also the ways some use language to separate rather than connect. It’s hard to imagine any art house crowd baulking at this approach, and R.M.N. should see significant international play given the director’s reputation and the subject matter.
As every fairytale figure knows only too well, fearful things lurk in the woods, and one day on his way to school eight-year-old Rudi (Edward Mark Blenyesi) sees something so scary he’s made mute. It’s an added burden for his mother Ana (Macrina Bârl?deanu), who’s largely been raising him alone since her estranged husband Matthias (Marin Grigore, Legacy) is in Germany working in a slaughterhouse. The situation there isn’t great either so when someone calls him a gypsy, Matthias headbutts the guy and returns to Romania just before Christmas, thinking he’ll sort out his kid and reconnect with his one-time mistress Csilla (Judith State).
Matthias is a familiar figure, a brooding working class man whose Romanian nationality is looked down upon in the West, which means he needs to exert his male power in other places. “People who feel pity die first” he warns his son as he tries to toughen the boy up and combat Ana’s “sissifying.” He’s an unlikely lover for Csilla, a cello-playing, wine-drinking globalized woman who manages the village’s largest employer, an industrial bakery, and lives alone with her dog Kaiser. Like much of the country the workforce has hemorrhaged westward: the local mine is shuttered thanks to EU regulations and many of the locals who remain won’t accept the minimum wages offered by the bakery’s owner Mrs. Dénes (Orsolya Moldován). That forces her to go through an agency to hire first two and then three Sri Lankans, Mahinda (Amitha Jayasinghe), Alick (Gihan Edirisinghe) and Rauff (Nuwan Karunarathna).
They’re not the only foreigners in town – there’s also Ben (Victor Benderra), a Frenchman working for an NGO tasked with counting the local bear population. But he’s from Western Europe whereas the Sri Lankans are very much the “other” and immediately become the focus of a hate campaign from all sides of the community. Csilla tries to downplay the problem, telling them not to worry, but it’s easy for her to say when she’s not the target of increasingly violent rhetoric. The irony of course, which Mungiu is at pains to underline, is that Transylvania is historically a region where different populations have always settled. For the past few decades it’s also an area from which significant numbers have left seeking work abroad despite rampant anti-Romanian prejudice.
It’s no coincidence that Mungiu sets his story over Christmas, when a certain family also failed to find haven except in an abandoned manger. A Hungarian Catholic church service devolves into a communal diatribe when Mahinda, a Catholic, and Alick come to worship but are kicked out and the priest (Jóssef Bíró), after half-heartedly protesting, does nothing to counter his parishioners’ mix of racism and toxic lies, even from the local doctor (Miklós Bács) who claims Asians have a different pathology and carry diseases like AIDS and bird flu.
The village assembly inevitably brings to mind the final part of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, but in that film Radu Jude mixes artfully constructed artificiality with verbal vulgarities that make audiences deeply uncomfortable with their balance of outrageous humor and corrosive sanctimoniousness. By contrast Mungiu, for whom naturalism is a religion, delivers his scene in a forthright manner, and while the sentiments expressed are horrendous, their straightforward presentation elides so closely with how xenophobes openly express themselves today that it almost loses the power to shock us out of our complacency.
A further sticking point is the relationship between Matthias and Csilla, which never quite feels believable given her cultural openness and his volatile wounded machismo – a one night stand sure, but lovers? It’s also problematic that there’s an ambiguous moment at the very end during a confrontation between the two, leading to narrative confusion that undermines the potentially magical last shot. Such cavils don’t lessen several terrific scenes, such as a classic meal sequence, a staple of Mungiu’s cinema, in which the conflicting emotions of each character, largely played out in facial expressions and body language, are like a giant canvas on which each quadrant reflects an entire inner world. Equally marvelous is an intimate moment between Csilla and the three Sri Lankan men, when she and Rauff use different methods to make music with water glasses.
The director reteams with d.p. Tudor Vladimir Panduru, whose carefully constructed framing and smooth movements are dictated by Mungiu’s decision to shoot each scene in only one take, a choice that presumably kept the actors fresh (line delivery is, as expected, flawlessly natural) but must have made staging and editing difficult. The film’s title is briefly referenced when Matthias’ father Otto (Andrei Fin?i) goes in for a scan, but it’s really meant as a comment on the brain’s complexities and the difficulties in pinpointing how we behave.
Director: Cristian Mungiu
Screenplay: Cristian Mungiu
Cast: Marin Grigore, Judith State, Macrina Bârl?deanu, Orsolya Moldován, Andrei Fin?i, Mark Blenyesi, Ovidiu Cri?an, Amitha Jayasinghe, Gihan Edirisinghe, Nuwan Karunarathna, Jóssef Bíró,
Edward Mark Blenyesi, Victor Benderra, Zoltán Deák, Miklós Bács
Producer: Cristian Mungiu
Executive producer: Tudor Reu
Co-producers: Pascal Caucheteux, Grégoire Sorlat, Delphine Tomson, Anthony Muir, Kristina Börjeson
Cinematography: Tudor Vladimir Panduru
Production designer: Simona P?dure?u
Costume designer: Cire?ica Cuciuc
Editing: Mircea Olteanu
Sound: Olivier Do Hùu, Constantin Fleancu, Marius Left?rache
Production companies: Mobra Films (Romania), Why Not Productions (France), France 3 Cinéma (France), Filmgate Films, Film i Väst (Sweden), Les Films du Fleuve (Belgium)
World sales: Wild Bunch International
Venue: Cannes (competition)
In Romanian, Hungarian, German, English, French
126 minutes
