You Don’t Belong Here

A middle-aged surgeon’s self-regarding assumption he is on a moral high ground takes a pummeling when his son is suspected of murder in Romanian director Florin Serban’s stark, devastating reckoning with complacent privilege and toxic masculinity You Don’t Belong Here, which screens in the Narrative Feature competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival close on the heels of taking the top the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival. A return to form for the director, noted for his 2010 Berlinale-awarded debut If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle, the film cleaves close to his Romanian New Wave roots in its unhurried, dialogue-heavy realism and cutting observations.

The small town of Resita in the west of Romania is shot in static, long takes that emphasise its nondescript, anywhere-ville nature. But a burst of chaotic crimes immediately throws us into the uncomfortable realisation that hostility is out of control within the community. First, a masked gang of teens on bikes slashes the tyres of cars in an area where many Roma live, and leaves signs with racist slogans on windows. Then, the corpse of a man beaten to death by the youths for intervening lies at the hospital awaiting autopsy, its mass framed as a brutally unceremonious fact. An overnight rampage through the morgue by Roma intent on reclaiming the body and saving it from desecration by clinical scalpel has been unsuccessful.

Marius (Adrian Vancica, suitably commanding and cold), a widower who moved back to his hometown after aceing medical school, is long accustomed, as the local hospital’s chief, to being a big fish in a small pond. But he reveals jaded cynicism in long, philosophical conversations with his lover Dana (Cristina Richter), who he pays visits out of convenience rather than love, and with his former schoolmate Silviu (Alex Conovaru), who is now the local police chief and favours harsh measures against any suspected law-breakers who cross his path. Marcius believes an iron toughness is the only way to motivate those around him, but niggling doubts have crept in over his perceived greatness, and whether it is any longer relevant in a society that no longer values the rugged charms of supposed “real” men.

Marius laments that his son Ioan (a convincingly nervy Teodor Butanescu) has little direction or ambition, repeating the proverb that every crow thinks his chick is a swan. But the extent of his offspring’s failings will only gradually become apparent, as the real reason for his leg injury emerges, and the cops come calling to search for the yellow bicycle that was involved in the murder, in scenes as dark and deadpan as some of the best Romanian police procedurals.

The school reunion of Marius’s 1995 graduation class is an on-the-nose coda that underlines the positioning, already set up in conversations, of the narrative conflicts within the wider scope of a flawed education system and a misguided obsession with social standing over actual integrity. Marius is above the masses because his professional standing tells him so, according to this logic — and even if his confidence is fading, when it comes to the crunch, he will pass this code of untouchability, which those on the margins cannot access, onto his son.

Serban, with a steady and deliberate hand, takes time delineating this world and its outmoded rules in a film that stretches beyond two and a half hours, but never feels bloated. Revelations, when they come, hit like precise, cold hammers more shocking than fists in the midst of sharp dialogue, exposing characters’ true natures, even if consequences may not come at once in a town where myriad unseen mechanisms protect the powerful. The family’s grandiose illusions about themselves are crumbling fast, but living any other way requires more imagination than they’ve as yet been able to muster.

Director, writer, producer, editor: Florin Serban
Cast: Adrian Vancica, Teodor Butanescu, Cristina Richter, Alex Conovaru, Izdraila Janir
Cinematographer: Liviu Marghidan
Music: Marius Left?rache, Nikita Dembinski
Production design: Bogdan Ionescu
Production company: Fantascope Films (Romania)
Sales: REASON8
Venue: Sarajevo (Narrative Feature Competition)
In Romanian
154 minutes