occident (w&d mungiu)

Mungiu’s first feature is a brilliant, flawed piece of filmmaking. Perhaps it’s easy to say in retrospect that there’s something callow about the film, given how it becomes clear in the director’s later career his capacity for conveying both emotion and tension. Nevertheless there’s a formal dexterity to Occident which wins the viewer over. The leap from Occident to 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days is fascinating. 4 Months possesses an intensity and tension which Occident barely hints at. Occident feels in many ways as though it belongs to a line of Eastern European filmmaking which celebrated the quirks of their respective societies, (think also of Kustirica’s early films and others such as Nemescu, Porumboiu or Menzel, even early Kieslowski.) The tone of much of this filmmaking is tongue-in-cheek, affectionate and ironic; also, clearly limited by what the censor permitted. 4 Months represented a step into a darker, more threatening world, with a level of psychological violence which grabbed the viewer by the throat. Having said which, Occident is a highly engaging piece of filmmaking in its own right. There’s a formal investigation of narrative, with three interwoven stories, reminiscent of its near contemporary Amores Perros. The fractured narrative is punctuated by freeze frames and the occasional crane shot, stylistic flourishes which the director dispensed with in his later films. The opening sequence runs the risk of becoming schmaltzy (notably through the use of music) but as the film builds layer upon layer, it lures the viewer in. In the end, Occident offers a diverse portrait of early C21st Bucharest, a city where Macdonalds and a ‘World Trade Centre’ commercial zone cohabit with rundown Ceausescu era apartment blocks. One where ordinary Romanians dream of escape to the West, whilst maintaining an affectionate, pre-atomised society which, his next film will go on to suggest, will soon be blown apart.

graduation (w&d christian mungiu)

There’s a rare pleasure to settling down to watch a film and realising that the guiding hand behind it knows exactly what they’re doing. You can sit back in your seat and trust that the narrative is going to engage, inform, give you a pay-off. 

Mungiu delivers exactly this in his latest film. It’s centred on a doctor, Romeo, who works in a small town, Cluj. Romeo doesn’t seem overly sympathetic at first. For a start he doesn’t look like most leading men. Rather, he looks like an ordinary middle-aged man. Overweight, specs, slightly hunched shoulders, careworn. We start off early knowing that he’s cheating on his wife and that he’s willing to bend the rules if he has to in order to ensure his daughter gets the grades she needs to study in the UK. It’s not a great starting position and Romeo has to earn the audience’s respect, gain our trust. Which, over the course of two hours, he does. The film probes and teases Romeo’s world, revealing how the small town he lives in functions, and the way in which these conditions shape a man or a woman’s morality. This is the other side of the social realism movie coin. Not the one that uses the lower classes as zoo fodder for the middle class cinema-going public, but one that carefully dissects the entirety of a community, pulling every loose string, slowly building a comprehensive portrayal of why the world it depicts functions like it does. 

Adrian Titen, as Romeo, present in almost every scene, delivers a masterful performance. Then again, so does every other actor. There’s not a single off-key note. As the story gradually plays itself out, we come to understand not only where every character fits into the world of the film, but also what their hopes, dreams and fears are. None of this ever becomes laboured. Meticulously, the film describes how Cluj functions, and why Romeo’s destiny has to be that which it is. (As such the film acts as an interesting corollary to Toni Erdmann). There’s nothing spectacular about Graduation, it doesn’t have the fireworks of the director’s most famous film, but it’s a storyteller’s film and constantly engaging. Sometimes telling a plain story is the hardest thing to do well. Mungiu does it with aplomb.

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (dir. Cristian Mungiu)

By 'eck it's grim up North. Or out East, in this instance. Mungiu's tale is one of austere miserabilsm, which clearly caught the consciences of the pampered Cannes jury, who awarded it the Palme D'Or.

This fact is stressed in the trailer, when a thespian voice declaims the film's Cannes victory. Mungiu is part of the new Romanian cinema boom. His film, which describes the circumstances of an abortion, is cleverly set in a world which almost seems like it might be contemporary, but is actually set in the last days of the Ceausescu tyranny. It's a world where everything is a hassle, and everyone's on the make. Trying to do something as simple as book a hotel room becomes a trial, with the hotel staff acting like they have a mandate from the Politburo to piss everyone off.

Mungiu establishes this world with a sharp eyed camera, which follows Otilia (played with a survivor's verve by Anamaria Marinca) as she goes about trying to help her friend Gaby, who is seeking the abortion. Otilia evades the bus conductors and deals with the hotel staff. She collects the creepy abortionist, Bebe, and does what needs to be done to ensure that the abortion goes ahead.

Bebe is a borderline psychopath, and Vlad Ivanov plays him with an understated menace. It's after he leaves that the film seems to lose direction, unsure whether it's in the genre of psychological horror, as the trailer suggests, or gritty social realism. It plumps more for the latter, with the discarded foetus lying on a bathroom floor acting as a visceral money shot. But even this image looks like it could belong to another genre. Mungiu has seeded various plot twists which are all red herrings - the knife; the missing ID papers etc. The audience's greatest fear is what will happen when Bebe returns, but Mungiu shies away from this as he explores Odilia's dark night of the soul on the streets of a relentlessly menacing but ultimately harmless Bucharest.

Mungiu's skill as a filmmaker is not in doubt. His ability to capture the nuances of social interaction is surgical, notably in the scenes between Odilia and her out-of-his-depth boyfriend. He lets the camera roll to generate a high level of tension in the Bebe scenes, and has no fear of inflicting merciless realism on his audience in the abortion scene. However, the red herrings, rather than adding to the story, in the end get in the way. Odilia's last line to the friend who's dragged her through a night of hell feels like a soft soap pay off. We've been taken to some bleak places, but nothing like as bleak as we'd feared.

Perhaps this is what the Cannes jury appreciated - Mungiu's ultimate good taste. In contrast to a film like Cargo 200, we come away from 4 Months... grateful that our society is supposedly more tender than this bleak vision of Bucharest, but hardly alienated by what we've seen. Mungiu's vision is harsh but never deranged. It represents a clinical, observational eye which mirrors the one we like to think we possess, when we stir ourselves enough to rise from the primordial soup of our materialist lives. The ultimate appeal of the film is the way it triggers our own better natures to engage with the screen, which leaves the cinema goer feeling enlightened by the misery, rather than disturbed by it. As such 4 Months... thrives on the strengths and ultimately succumbs to the weaknesses of social realism, a 'realism' all the more palatable for being set in a long-lost world of monstrous tyranny.