R.M.N review – effort­less brilliance

If Europe were a per­son, it would be in dire need of emer­gency med­ical atten­tion. So says Roman­ian New Wave lynch­pin Cris­t­ian Mungiu, whose qui­et­ly scathing and pre­ci­sion-tooled new work admin­is­ters an extreme­ly thor­ough exam­i­na­tion of the dis­eased patent, but comes to no clear prog­no­sis about its chances for sur­vival. The clue is in the title, which is the Roman­ian acronym for MRI.

In fact, it does end up sug­gest­ing that we, as a soci­ety, might do well to take some time out and pon­der whether the howl­ing rage that has become valu­able polit­i­cal cur­ren­cy in the con­tem­po­rary world may be caus­ing more prob­lems than it is in locat­ing ratio­nal solutions.

The film opens, as all films should, on a mas­sive head­butt, as per­pet­u­al­ly unsmil­ing man-hulk Matthias (Marin Grig­ore) takes vio­lent umbrage when his boss at a Ger­man bor­der-town abat­toir refers to him as a ​“Lazy Gyp­sy”. We lat­er dis­cov­er that his anger was couched in a recent and suc­cess­ful purge of the Roma pop­u­la­tion from his dinky Tran­syl­van­ian vil­lage, and even though he’s a man who tends to keep his polit­i­cal views close­ly guard­ed, that com­ment clear­ly hits a raw nerve.

Mungiu’s inti­mate and intri­cate dra­ma takes in ques­tions of dyed-in-the-wool provin­cial big­otry and the ways in which it spreads like a virus through dig­i­tal and inter­per­son­al means. Yet this is absolute­ly not a polemic, or a cin­e­mat­ic plea for a soft­en­ing of atti­tudes, as the direc­tor is pri­mar­i­ly inter­est­ed in weed­ing out the root cause of this dan­ger­ous shift in civic understanding.

This is where Csil­la (Judith State) comes in. She is the gen­er­al man­ag­er at a local bread fac­to­ry and who needs addi­tion­al labour for the busy Christ­mas peri­od, but opts to look beyond Romania’s bor­ders and, indeed, the lit­tle vil­lage for any­one who would accept their measly wage terms. Csil­la and her Mer­cedes-dri­ving boss attempt to sell their ploy to locals as a boon for diver­si­ty and claim to be squeaky clean when it comes to EU employ­ment law, but the folks are hav­ing none of it. And how do you argue with some­one who believes that Sri Lankans (the eth­nic­i­ty of the new­ly hired bak­ers) don’t wipe their ass­es and touch the food with their dirty hands?

The burn is slow and the cumu­la­tive impact is immense as Mungiu spends a good hour mov­ing all his pieces into posi­tion before thwack­ing us with an explo­sive town meet­ing of the sort that, in bygone days, would’ve giv­en the polit­i­cal green light to the Final Solu­tion. Csil­la believes that peace­able means and ratio­nal con­duct will win the day, as she attempts to dis­miss the prob­lem as a small mob of drunk­en extrem­ists. Her tone changes when they turn up at her cot­tage with fire­bombs and Klan masks.

With RMN, Mungiu gives us what feels like a con­tem­po­rary west­ern in the John Ford mode, where a lone, moral­ly right­eous hero must pro­tect the oppressed, grease the cogs of cap­i­tal­ism and Chris­tian­i­ty and gen­tly teach the vil­lage­folk the col­lec­tive error of their ways. With its strong female hero­ine and male lead who’s nudged to the side in the sec­ond act, it even feels a lot like a riff on Nicholas Ray’s John­ny Guitar.

And like so often in these west­ern movie, the hero has her own demons to deal with. It all ends on a howl of despair as Mungiu, final­ly, decides to muf­fle the objec­tiv­i­ty for a moment and offer his provoca­tive and ambigu­ous take on the para­dox at the cen­tre of the film. Guar­an­teed you won’t know what it means and you absolute­ly won’t see it com­ing. So it’s anoth­er very spe­cial film from this excep­tion­al­ly gift­ed and thought­ful (and extreme­ly angry) director.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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