A quartet of narrative fragments unfold in the shape of an exquisite corpse in MMXX, the loquacious latest from the great Romanian auteur Cristi Puiu. The title is the roman numeral equivalent of 2020, and this is a film which appears to extend some of the gripes that the writer-director publicly aired while promoting his (superlative) previous feature, Malmkrog, in the period when the pandemic had initially plateaued and film festivals were once more open for socially-distanced business.
Originally he was angered with the top-down ramifications of blindly abiding by government health procedure, particularly in a country where most could still smell the vapours of the totalitarian Ceaușescu régime that was toppled in 1989. This is not an outright propaganda film, and Puiu is such a skilled and subtle dramatist that it would take an eagle-eyed (and eared) viewer to pick out any hint of polemic-by-proxy. Yet the lifestyle, paraphernalia and added layers of domestic frenzy that derived from the pandemic era all feature in the backdrop to these four supremely provocative and articulate shorts. But how much these stories are actually catalysed or driven by the social dictats of 2020 remains up for debate.
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The four shorts encompass the same broad style, though the first and third are two-hander dialogues captured in a single, unblinking take. The second anecdote resembles the director’s chaotic 2016 ensemble drama Sieranevada, replete with cacophonous in-fighting, semi-serious “plandemic” conspiracy theorising and possibly a world record for phone calls made to different people during 40 minutes of screen-time. The fourth episode appears to stand alone in that it plays in external rather than interior locations, and sees Puiu riffing a little on genre by presenting a key interrogation in a sex and organ trafficking ring.
Tonally it’s a mixed bag, as the first story, in which a harried therapist draws out the narcissistic tendencies of her subject with minimal effort, plays things to a level of comic absurdity. The delivery and timing of the dialogue, plus the subtle interruptions and digressions, all add up to an engaging and objective piece about medical quackery and patients with no sense of how other people live.
The second piece sees aggression go from the passive to the pointed as the therapist’s younger brother attempts to make rum babas while his other sister, a nurse, desperately tries to assist a heavily pregnant friend who’s having a bad time at a Covid hospital. The time it takes to complete two lateral flow tests marks the beginning and end of the third story, a somewhat meandering recollection between two ambulance workers of a lurid affair with a gangster’s moll.
Beyond the overlap of characters in the first three films, it’s not at all obvious how these stories connect. Yet that’s not particularly detrimental to the pleasures that the film has to offer. Taken together, the effect is a despairing, somewhat conservative portrait of modern Romania, one in which venality, anger, violence and amorality has taken over and people now feel empowered to tear one another – be it body or mind – apart.
