After making a careful and harsh portrait of adolescence with ‘Alice T.’, Romanian Radu Muntean returns three years later with “Between Valleys”, a social drama with a spirit of sour satire and a few touches of suspensewhich reaches the commercial halls after passing through the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at the 74th Cannes Film Festival and with which the director takes up the spirit of one of his most successful feature films, ‘Tuesday after Christmas’especially when it comes back to the hypocrisy and cynicism of the bourgeois class.
Muntean returns to the Christmas holidays to strip the reality behind the apparent good intentions. An association of volunteers organizes several trips on the road to distribute gift bags to different cities in the Transylvania region, one of the most emblematic of the country and also one of the most representative. The original title of the film refers to one of these cities, Întrigalde, which means ‘Between the rivers’. The director portrays the beginning as if it were a contemplative film, in which three volunteers, Maria, Ilinca and Dan, make the journey every year.
The director, who signs the screenplay together with Alexandru Baciu and Razvan Radulescu, regular collaborators of his filmography, changes course when Kente bursts onto the scene, an old man who seems lost and asks the three volunteers if they can leave him at the old sawmill. Everything goes wrong when the volunteer truck gets stuck in a ditch and the three discover that the sawmill has been abandoned for years and that the old man seems to have lost his mind and that’s when Muntean starts playing him, where he pushes some moderately well-off protagonists to the limit once again, making them sit in front of the mirror.
A clear portrait of the double bottom of charity
This is where an odyssey begins with which Muntean delves into the true intentions behind altruism., raising the question of the extent to which it is an exercise in megalomania. The director plays with his three volunteers, the magnificent Maria Popistasu, Ilona Brezoianu and Alex Bogdan, who end up showing the different faces of good deeds. Among them is a non-professional actor, Luca Sabin, who brings the spirit of the inhabitant of the area in an extraordinary parable that offers harsh doses of reality.
Although Muntean specifically directs this social drama with some hints of black humor, what distinguishes it from ‘Entre valles’ is that it constantly plays with elements of terror (the break-in of a sordid stranger, stranded at night in the middle of a forest, feeling the threat of darkness, the fact that the plot is set in the house of Count Dracula …), which causes waiting until its bitter resolutionwith which Muntean returns to slap reality, raising the question of who benefits most from acts of charity and if they end up encouraging anyone to heal.
Muntean has managed to establish himself as one of the great Romanian directors of his generation, distinguishing himself for a style that, without abandoning the social focus, introduces elements of black humor more typical of Buñuel or Berlanga’s cinema. ‘Ente valles’ is a new demonstration of how Romania has managed to carve out a niche for itself synonymous with prestigious, combative cinema that openly looks at the hypocrisy and impudence of certain social classes.
Note: 7
The best: Certain situations worthy of the comedy of the absurd.
Worse: He gets lost in certain scenes.
Source: E Cartelera
