Radu Jude – no fan of the way his home country is run, ruled, or even lived in – has always found different ways to portrait the rot at the heart of modern Romania (and, by extension, the world and its mainstream culture at large). In Bad Luck Banging, it was through pure abrasive sexual aggression and hypocrisy. In Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World it was how *rude* everyone is, be they expressing that in loutish street shouting or dismissive corporate-speak. Now, in Kontinental 25, he does it through stultification, a slow-motion moral car crash that is, as always, politically razor-sharp but tested my patience well beyond its limits.
Setting its sights on the scourge of homelessness and the property developers who have pushed this crisis past breaking point, Kontinental 25 follows Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a bailiff in Cluj, as she evicts a homeless man from the basement he’s been staying in on behalf of developers who want to turn the property into a boutique hotel. When that man kills himself, Orsolya has something of a breakdown, wracked with guilt, a guilt she attempts to work through across a series of conversations with her workmates, husband, friends, mother, and priest.
And that’s it – these conversations are the entirety of Kontinental 25, Jude using each one to show different responses to the crisis, from the pure bureaucracy of Orsolya’s employers, to a callous attempt to laugh it off from her husband, to her mother using it as an excuse to launch into a racist rant. Shot documentary-style in endless single takes, these really do feel like real conversations, which is both Kontinental 25’s strength and its greatest weakness. Jude has an incredible ability to tap into the (often uncomfortably funny) feelings of the real, uninformed people who make up most of his country, but the reality of real conversations is that, cinematically, they kind of suck.
Repetition and shallow insights are everywhere, and it soon becomes a slog to get through, even with Tompa’s remarkably authentic central performance. The verité style compounds the issue; bar a bizarre trip to a park filled with animatronic dinosaurs, there’s very little to get invested in visually. Jude is a filmmaker you have to have a sort of intellectual respect for – no one else making movies seems to have as clear a grasp on the current moment as him – but I can’t say I’d ever be in a hurry to watch Kontinental 25 again.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 