Justin Chang reviews Radu Jude’s blistering contemporary riff on Roberto Rossellini, in which a death sends a bailiff spiralling into a campaign of self-flagellation.
Relatively speaking, then, the words “Kontinental ’25” are a model of cryptic concision, which suits the tautly streamlined story that the film has to tell. But, as Jude has noted in interviews, the title is also an allusion.
It harks back to Roberto Rossellini’s great drama “Europe ’51” , about a rich, frivolous socialite, Irene Girard , who, blaming herself for the death of her young son, commits herself to serving the poor and neglected—a humanitarian awakening that is met with bewilderment and condemnation from her family. Jude relocates this tale of troubled conscience to present-day Cluj-Napoca, in Transylvania, and subjects it to a corrosively cynical twist. The socialite is now a bailiff, Orsolya Ionescu , who has a husband and three children, none of whom, mercifully, dies; the plight of the young and comfortable is not Jude’s concern. The inciting tragedy concerns Ion Glanetașu , a drifter in his early sixties, whom we encounter in the film’s opening moments, grumbling to himself as he wanders the grounds of a prehistoric-themed public park. People may avoid him, but he at least has some impressively hulking animatronic dinosaurs to keep him company. What are we to make of this tourist-trap commodification of natural history? Are human beings really that much more evolved than our Cretaceous counterparts? These questions linger as Ion goes about his day, looking for work, begging for change, and scarfing down a meal—moments that flash by in quick, propulsive blips. Jude and the cinematographer Marius Panduru shot the film on an iPhone, and the nimbleness and range of their outdoor setups summon forth images of a crisp, unshowy beauty. In one casually stunning composition, Ion looms in the foreground over the rooftops of Cluj in the background. It would be a postcard-worthy image, the film wryly suggests, if someone would just cut Ion out of the frame. Jude will soon do just that. Ion has been squatting in the basement of an apartment building, which is set to be levelled to make way for a luxury hotel called the Kontinental Boutique. Enter Orsolya, who shows up at the door with some gendarmes and an official eviction notice and gives Ion twenty minutes to quit the premises. Throughout the process, Orsolya makes a great show of her reasonableness and decency. She’s provided Ion with many notices and extensions already; she’s thoughtfully arranged transportation for his things; she’d be glad to put him in touch with her priest. Ion responds with the only reasonable gesture he can muster: left alone to pack up his things, he twists a length of wire around his neck and hangs himself from a radiator. The evictors return and try to save him, but they’re too late, and Orsolya, like Bergman’s Irene before her, finds herself utterly unmoored. Unlike Irene, though, she proceeds to hurl herself into a crisis that is ultimately more self-serving than soul-searching. She sends her husband and kids off on a pre-planned Greek holiday, choosing instead to stick around Cluj for a good, long mope. Much of “Kontinental ’25” unfolds as a series of one-on-one conversations, each filmed in a lengthy single take, with the two speakers side by side in the frame. These sustained durations build a sense of unforced naturalism but also a steadily pulsing tension; the talk can be at once pointed and meandering, and Jude throws in at least two references to Bertolt Brecht, just in case we were not yet in a sufficiently analytical or argumentative frame of mind. Orsolya has an unpleasant visit with her mother ; seeks spiritual counsel from the aforementioned priest, Father Șerban ; and tells anyone and everyone she meets about the horror of Ion’s death—invariably stressing, with a pious, preëmptive defensiveness, that, although she isn’t legally responsible for what happened, she feels morally burdened all the same. Contrast her behavior with that of Rossellini’s Irene, who bravely turned her torments outward, saving a sick child, helping a mother find a job, and comforting a sex worker in her final hours. The only troubled brow that Orsolya seems interested in soothing is her own. His instincts, like his techniques, are relentlessly up-to-the-minute; Orsolya is hounded by not only her guilty conscience but also the demons of social media. “Kontinental ’25” isn’t as TikTok-saturated as “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” , but it evinces an acute awareness of how the internet has reduced both penitence and outrage to largely performative states. There’s also the fact that Orsolya is Hungarian, and that Ion, years before he became destitute, was a medal-winning Romanian athlete—all of which has spurred online trolls into bursts of racist, misogynist invective: “I’d beat you to a pulp, you filthy Hungarian bitch” is a typical response. As Orsolya’s friend Dorina tartly claims, Romania “stole” Transylvania from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, and Cluj itself remains profoundly Hungarian—which explains those postcard-pretty vistas to begin with. “Doesn’t this look like Vienna or Budapest?” Dorina points out. “Does this look like any of the southern Romanian towns?” Nationalist pride is a regular target in Jude’s movies: witness Orsolya’s mother, a spiteful piece of work, who expresses, in an emphysemic rasp, her support for Hungary and its fascist Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán. But the film also sees the roots of toxic nativism elsewhere, especially in the wars being waged in Ukraine and Gaza, both of which become passing points of conversation. Orsolya frets over these and other horrors, but, in Tompa’s performance, awash in vulnerable tears one moment and exuding stubborn defensiveness the next, we see a woman paralyzed into inaction by her capitalist comforts, her liberal complacency, her Orthodox faith, and her uncertainty about how to engage beyond rote charitable donations as quick and meaningless as an Amazon purchase. Orsolya’s belated attack of conscience is as useless as her apathy—which doesn’t make her an unsympathetic protagonist, only a deeply recognizable one. “Kontinental ’25” is, in short, a movie about the way we live now, the way we cope now, and, perhaps most of all, the way we rationalize now. Its most revealing moment may be a throwaway exchange in which Orsolya tells Dorina that, out of pity for evictees like Ion, she doesn’t take on any such ousters during the winter months—an attempted show of self-awareness and compassion that is also an admission of futility, complicity, and defeat. But then, just when it seems that we might be stuck, alongside Orsolya, in a circle of eternal recrimination, a figure from the past unexpectedly reënters her life: Fred Vasilescu , who, about a dozen years ago, was a student in her Roman law class. Now Fred is a food courier, a self-styled Zen Buddhist, and—thanks to Tanța’s performance, a first-class piece of clownery—a figure of boisterous, foul-mouthed wit and cynical irreverence. He is also the only one of Orsolya’s conversation partners who, over a couple of boozy, gabby nights, succeeds in pulling her even briefly out of her self-imposed torment. Orsolya’s guilt, you sense, will eventually blow over, and her moral anguish will, like Ion’s existence, be forgotten. But Jude hasn’t forgotten Ion, and he pointedly bookends the film’s opening scenes in the dinosaur park with a silent montage of houses and apartment buildings around Cluj, some of them still under construction, and none of them remotely within reach of those who need them the most. The Kontinental Boutique, presumably, will soon join their company. ♦
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