‘RMN’: Film Review | skin 2022

The title of Palme d’Or winner Christian Mungiu’s new film is an acronym for his native Romania. But NMR It is actually a local acronym for MRI, taken by one of the characters in the film, and which is an apt term for a film that performs a large-scale brain scan of a nation that has many racial, social, and political conflicts. National, ecological and here at least emotional diversity.

The writer-director puts all that tension under the microscope in this slow-burning small-town drama set in rural Transylvania, a land at the crossroads of many nations and languages ​​that collide during Christmas. Like Mungiu’s previous work, especially in 2016. WalkWhat won him the Cannes Film Award for Best Director is a masterfully understated film that features several distinct sections, most notably a one-off Town Hall meeting that puts a full spin on it and throws all the problems on the table before it explodes. . Chaos.

This is the high point of a film that takes time, perhaps too much, to combine its different characters and stories to come to a conclusion that lacks clarity and can leave viewers asking more questions than they want to. Again, NMR This is a fascinating and very human investigation into the many problems faced by one of the last countries to join the EU, Romania joined Bulgaria in 2007, with a number of people trying to make the most of their lives.

Among them is Matthias (Marin Gregory), a bulky and stoic butcher who returns from Germany to his hometown of Rechia, where he chases an old fire, a chila (owned by Judith), a cellist and a music lover who manages the bread. local. . . Factory for his daily work.

Mungiu’s script follows the two as they discuss a variety of topics, both personal and professional, related to snowballing during winter break. For Matthias, that means trying to connect with his non-verbal son, Rudd (Mark Blanes), while caring for an ailing father, Papa Otto (Andrei Finn), who is getting an MRI after passing out one morning on his farm. For Chila, that means a relationship with a new Sri Lankan worker, whose arrival in the city sparks a racist uprising from the locals.

The film begins with little Rudy walking through a forest on his way to school one morning, where he sees something unknown that leaves him scared and stunned. As in a good fairy tale, this small event serves as a metaphor for a place plagued by fear of outsiders, a region inhabited by Romanians, Hungarians and Germans at different times, where the actors constantly switched languages ​​throughout the film. (The captions on the cover have been color-coded to indicate different languages.)

After this prologue, we see Matthias running away from work abroad after being attacked by a manager who called him a “gypsy”, an ironic insult considering that when he returns home Matthias is a local and Sri Lankan workers are treated as undesirables. by an emigrant. . he was. Issues of identity and nationality continue to plague the characters until they boil over during the second half of the film, when part of the Hungarian population begins to openly protest against the newcomers, committing a crime that was cut straight from the book: Ku Klux. Clan.

It feels more explosive than it actually is in the film: Munji’s drama takes time to put together and is more thought-provoking than action-packed, grounded in the reality of human behavior and the sleepy pace of rural life. Working Walk Tudor cameraman Vladimir Panduru, the director, relies on a wide variety of master shots to capture ghastly mountain landscapes and capture events in one shot, allowing actors to interpret their long scenes raw.

Such a method works wonders at key moments, for example in the Town Hall sequence, where Matthias and Chila, whose vague romance is a recurring emotional subtext, join dozens of other villagers to discuss whether to ban foreign workers. Everyone and mother, and grandparents who respond to your opinion. The scene above, where Sila sits down with a Sinhalese man at a cozy home-cooked dinner that turns into an impromptu show, provides much-needed respite in a conflict that lasts just a few songs before violence stops them.

Where Munjiu’s layered narrative doesn’t work, the ending is so thought-provoking that it remains more or less dark, which is unfortunate because before that, NMR I was building something strong. If it were possible to clarify this ending, the film would have been even better; There is a lot of uncertainty in the good sense, what can we think about people’s decisions between personal and national affiliations and only the need to pay taxes, a situation that is not completely different from the United States, France or many other countries. .

The paradox that hangs over Munjiu’s film as a bad omen, or as mountain bears roaming the forest near a town deemed ecologically valuable but a real threat to society, is that the open border extends in two ways, allowing that people like Matthias and Chila escape. And finding well-paying jobs abroad, which is destroying the local economy while people from other countries are coming to replace them, causing population changes. In both cases, the person is never completely at home and in Romania. NMRThe house itself was never clearly defined.