Of all the films to compete for the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, RMN marks the second-to-last to actually reach UK shores, landing 15 months after its debut on the Croisette. Even with the European powerhouse name of director Cristian Mungiu behind it, it’s not hard to see why it didn’t get snapped up by distributors as quickly as its 2022 Cannes stablemates. This is a grim and difficult film about xenophobia, misogyny, and hypocrisy in rural Romania and, while it is pulled off with undeniable intelligence and finesse, only offers occasional rewards on its long path to a pretty unsatisfying ending.
Though the title is actually the Romanian translation of MRI, a machine that plays a small but pivotal role in the films ever-branching story, RMN naturally brings to mind the idea of Romania as a whole, an idea that Mungiu grapples with in his typically unsparing style. We start with Matthias (Marin Grigore), a Romanian worker in Germany who, after headbutting his German manager for calling him a gypsy, flees back to his Romanian hometown to find limited work, an ex who resents him, and a son who has been scared into silence by a sight he saw in the local woods.
This town, home to a mix of Romanians, Hungarians, and Germans, soon finds its ‘harmonious’ diversity altered by the arrival of Sri Lankan migrant workers, which brings out all of the townspeople’s most vile racism and culture wars imported from the US and UK (this is not a subtle film; hell, the second scene is a bunch of sheep being led to slaughter). Mungiu gets a lot of milage out of the hypocrisy that a nation currently built on shipping its working-age populace abroad for higher wages in better-off EU countries would then turn around and complain that their own empty factories are being filled with even cheaper labour.
He builds this frustration until it boils over in RMN’s centrepiece, an unbroken 15-20 minute take in the town hall as a dozen or so residents air their grievances – mostly racist and resentful, though Romania’s more tolerant side is represented by local bakery chief (and Matthias’s lover) Csilla (Judith State). It’s a really impressive moment on a technical level, the film, with all of its grimly beautiful winter-time shots of the Transylvanian countryside, suddenly becoming an intimate piece of theatre, but there’s not much to hold on to for an audience to actually care about.
Even with all its plot strands melding nationalistic fervour, family dysfunction, old-fashioned gender roles, and possibly prophetic children, there’s little here that ever feels novel. Though it is very slickly put together, RMN does often feel like paint-by-numbers European misery, at least until an incredibly opaque climax that swings too far in the opposite direction. It’s impossible to ignore everything that Mungiu does very well here – by the end of the film, you manage to have a real sense of character for about a dozen different townspeople and the backdrops are just stunning – but it’s in service of a story that just feels painfully familiar.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 