From Celine Song’s breakout Sundance hit Past Lives to Ira Sachs’s steamy three-way drama, here are the films to add to your watchlist this month
, emboldened by the chill political winds that have been sweeping through Europe these past few years. Cristian Mungiu’s hypnotic study of a community in revolt is based on a real-life incident from 2020, when thousands of locals in a Romanian village protested the arrival of three Sri Lankan workers at a bakery.
Mungiu’s version of events begins with a death foretold, a boy out walking in the woods on an ashy winter’s day in rural Transylvania. He sees something that we don’t in the trees, there’s a creaking noise, the kid begins to run. Boom! Five minutes in, and the director establishes a mood of latent violence that he sustains brilliantly over the film’s haunting 125 minutes.
The child’s father is Matthias , a wounded bear of a man forced to take work, like most of the men in the village, in a different country. On returning home from Germany, he learns that his son has stopped talking since the incident in the woods, and tries to ‘fix’ him with hunting trips and choice nuggets of wisdom like “people who feel pity die first”.
Matthias is a violent man, respected in the community but holding himself somewhat aloof from the pitchfork mob massed against the foreign arrivals, migrant workers like themselves. Where do his allegiances lie? The film seems to suggest that the question is key, floating the idea in a brilliant scene where a town hall meeting dissolves into a sort of carnival of the grotesque, but why is never that clear.
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