Cannes Review: Cristian Mungiu’s ‘RMN’

Longtime Cannes Film Festival favourite, Christian Munjiu returns to the rivalry between races and multiracial divisions in a small town in Transylvania. NMR As always, the writer-director works low and low with a handful of characters struggling to make ends meet and a society barely pulled together in a changing time. It’s a kind of up-close and personal look at current issues in an undramatized field or in the news that gives the film a fresh and urgent feel.

Early on, Mungyu points out that things are not going well in the city through a young man, Rudy’s character, who stops talking and seems scared of everything. The situation barely gets better when the boy’s sullen father, Matthias (Marin Gregory), returns from elsewhere, putting himself in earnest seriousness and making life even more difficult for the frightened boy and his mother, Anna.

Small-town women seem to represent their best hope, led by Sila (Judith State), a stocky strong man who was previously Matthias’ favourite. The annoying problem with the movie is that Matthias has a one-dimensional reaction stick that seems more attached to his gun than to his proximity; Walking around with a gun and in a bad mood likes to be bullied, is drawn to threats and violence, and makes any situation more unpleasant than it is.

The true nature of a small community is revealed when Sila, who runs a small food factory, recruits some dark-skinned immigrants from Sri Lanka to do bad jobs. The general argument is that it’s bad enough that outsiders didn’t come to do their job, but that racism was at the root of the peasants’ attitude and it wasn’t a big jump to what happened in Germany in the 1930s. .

All this would seem pointless if it weren’t for chila, a no-nonsense dynamo with a good spirit and boundless energy, who more or less showed everyone how to do it. There’s no doubt he’ll be successful wherever he goes, but he’s determined to keep his city on the map, bring it to the modern world and, if possible, make things right.

But the reactionaries won’t have it, especially after they find out that imported workers are processing their baked goods.

This straw, which breaks the back of the camel and accelerates the meeting in the town, reveals, to say the least, quite sharp and deep centuries-old superstitions on the part of the locals, especially the elderly. Interestingly, Mungyu strangely reduces the emotional impact of the scene by filming this climax scene from one fixed position, allowing only a partial view of the large, messy room. Didn’t you have enough supplies to fill the room? The scene could have been much more dynamic with some cuts and shots of many people with their own heated feelings and perspectives.

It is a welcome, rational yet poignant display of aspects of European politics and prejudice, at least not so often heard in the United States. New frontal perspectives on life in cities like this one are provocative and pleasant, but the film still retains a calm and observant sense of the director’s previous work. Also, Judith State is such a powerful masterpiece that it provides both a dramatic and emotional axis for this wonderful and unexpected contemporary drama.