Discover the trailer for RMN, the film that examines a Romania sick with its nationalism
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EXCLUSIVE – The new film by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, Palme d’or at Cannes in 2007, will be released on 19 October.
Since its beginnings, we know that the cinema of the director of 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (Palme d’or at Cannes in 2007) likes to anchor his stories in the cinematographic form of the fairy tale. His latest film, set in the heart of a small village in Transylvania nestled at the foot of the mountains, a few days before Christmas, is no exception to the rule.
We meet Matthias (played with power and accuracy by the actor Marin Grigore), the father of the kid scared of the first images, who works in a slaughterhouse in Germany. Tall, rough, silent, a little lost, he is called a “gypsy” by his superior. Stung to the quick, the man sends the foreman flying. Faced with the gravity of the situation, the hero leaves immediately to take refuge in his native village.
Read alsoCristian Mungiu: “Meritocracy does not exist in Romania”
Arriving unexpectedly at home, he finds his young wife, who reproaches him for his awkward attitude and his repeated absences from his 10-year-old son, Rudi. The little one walled up in a disturbing silence. Rejected from his home, the hero visits his father, Papa Otto, a kind of village patriarch who has lived alone for years on his farm. The old man is often subject to untimely fainting. He is the one who will undergo an MRI at the hospital so that we can know what he is suffering from inside his skull.
Left adrift, subjected to the wind and the storm which are unleashed before the Nativity, Matthias the biker drives his roaring machine on the snowy roads of Transylvania. Undecided, tossed about by events, sentimental, he wants to cling to his former girlfriend Scilla (Judith State), an emancipated young woman, operational manager of an industrial bakery which offers work to the population of the surrounding region. Scilla is looking to hire. Despite repeated job offers, no villager responds to the advertisements, the remuneration being considered too low. So, for lack of manpower, the company calls on Sri Lankan workers… And intends to receive some subsidies from the European Union.
The hiring of these few foreign employees soon arouses a wave of indignation. At the church, under the complacent eye of the falsely acrimonious priest, the faithful go wild. Mungiu films the village like a micro-tower of Babel, having successively seen the cohabitation of Hungarians, Romanians or Germans. The villagers use the three languages interchangeably.
An MRI of Romania, plagued by corruption
The locality is even home to a Frenchman (quite a snob and above ground) paid by the European Union to “count the bears in the forest”. With his merciless camera, Mungiu structures his film like a horrific children’s tale, centered on the ravages of an exacerbated nationalism.
The title of the film, RMN, is the acronym in Romanian for IRM, and that is exactly what Mungiu does, he probes the souls of this community turned in on itself, which lets its ordinary racism explode against of three uprooted Sri Lankans. Hidden fears, dull anxieties, a certain form of paranoia resurface until they culminate in a staggering (and masterful) sequence located in the village hall, where the director of Beyond the Hills (screenplay prize in 2012 ) films in a single sequence shot the white-hot concert of recriminations of the villagers.
After 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days, a charge against Ceausescu’s birth rate policy, Beyond the Hills, which pointed to abuses of religious power, and Baccalaureate, which targeted widespread corruption in the heartland of Romania, Mungiu left this time attacks xenophobic drifts anchored in the depths of the mountains of Transylvania. His cinema, as rigorous as it is fierce, touches the heart. He can already claim, like the Dardenne brothers, to win a second Palme d’Or.
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