CIFF 2022 | ‘R.M.N.’ review: A brutal, bold and unflinching dissection of European xenophobia
Romania’s stalwart arthouse director Cristian Mungiu returns after six years to examine Europe’s rising tides of racism and xenophobia.
Content warning: This article contains quoted racial slurs.
Marin Grigoire and Mark Blenyesi in “R.M.N.” Photo courtesy of Mobra Films RO.
“Get back to work. Fucking lazy Gypsy!”
We are barely five minutes into “R.M.N.” when the first slur explodes out of a character’s mouth; the first and hardly the worst instance of virulent racism and xenophobia that audiences will go on to encounter throughout the remaining two hours of the film. Set primarily in the Central European region of Transylvania, “R.M.N.” follows Matthias Auner (Marin Grigoire) as he returns to his rural hometown after quitting his job at a German slaughterhouse by brutally shoving his boss through a door for calling him the aforementioned slur. Matthias is a classically callous European masculine figure, hell-bent on turning his silent son Rudi (Mark Blenyesi) into a “real man,” and ignoring Rudi’s mother Ana (Macrina Bârlădeanu) in favour of rekindling old flames with his ex-lover, Csilla (Judith State).
But Csilla has problems of her own. She runs the town’s bread factory, a.k.a. the primary source of the village’s income, and is suffering from a shortage of employees due to the village’s inhabitants being unwilling to work for minimum wage. Desperate to meet production quotas, Csilla resorts to legally hiring two Sri Lankan workers, Mahinda (Amitha Jayasinghe) and Alick (Gihan Edirisinghe), who are more than happy to work for minimum wage if it means feeding their families back home in South Asia. However, in predictable European fashion — we’ve all seen what happened with Brexit — some of Csilla’s fellow villagers begin to grievously object to the workers’ presence in their hometown, causing long-held ethnic resentments to surface in a maelstrom of hatred and violence.
Director Cristian Mungiu, a stalwart Romanian presence in the film festival competition circuit, pulls out all the stops stylistically and technically for “R.M.N.,” following the bleak, stoically grey cinematographic traditions of European countries that could never quite tell which side of the Iron Curtain they were on. Murky birch forests and Dutch angles galore serve as visual parallels for the villagers’ unclear motivations. Ingenious sound design and camerawork come together to create a claustrophobic, blinkered view of each character’s perspective while the sounds of the village carry on elsewhere — there is always something happening off-screen; the world will always be bigger than anyone’s limited individual viewpoint. Reflecting the multilingual make-up of Transylvania’s population, Mungiu also differentiates each language through coloured subtitles, intended to show English-speaking audiences how similar, yet different, the two sister languages of Romanian and Hungarian are.
Interestingly enough, Mahinda and Alick’s conversations in Sinhala are initially left entirely untranslated until Csilla begins to befriend them. While some may argue that this decision effectively others them in a way that even Matthias and Csilla are not (essentially doing what Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs” did by inconsistently translating its Japanese dialogue), Mungiu explains this stylistic choice as illustrative of their plights — nobody cares to know what they are saying until someone actually gets to know them as people. While I was not entirely convinced by this explanation, given that we as audience members are behooved to care about every piece of dialogue for narrative clarity, I still appreciated the thinking behind such a choice.
To English-speaking audiences, “R.M.N.” may just appear to be the primary consonants in the word “Romania,” but the title actually comes from the Romanian acronym for “M.R.I.” It’s a fitting title in some ways and incredibly tongue-in-cheek in others, given that Mungiu manages to scan the inner workings of European bigotry in glorious detail, while keeping his protagonists’ feelings and desires mostly inscrutable to the audience. The former works particularly well even though the triangle of hatred that Mungiu aims to dissect is extremely complex and spans eons of European history. Besides the cut-and-dry colourism that the Transylvanian villagers hold on to, there is also the less-vocalised rivalry between ethnic Romanians and ethnic Hungarians, who have fought for control over Transylvania for centuries.
While Transylvania has officially been a Romanian territory since the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, many ethnic Hungarians still believe that the region rightfully belongs to them via ancestral birthright, being the historic stronghold of Attila the Hun and a key part of the ancient Kingdom of Hungary. Today, Transylvania is home to a sizable Hungarian minority who are no less vocal than their Romanian counterparts about the way the region should be run, much to the frustration of the latter. This historical context serves Mungiu’s film well. Rather than be subjected to yet another hackneyed “Caucasians vs. People of Colour” Oscar-bait piece, we instead see four distinct camps form — the Sri Lankan workers and their supporters, the xenophobes who want them out, and the ethnic Romanians and Hungarians who each believe that this is the perfect opportunity to kick the other out now that the town is finally talking about unwanted groups of people.
Mungiu’s protagonists Matthias and Csilla also add further complication and depth to this already multilayered conflict. Both are outsiders in their own way, sitting on the social sidelines of Transylvanian life. Csilla is Romanian by nationality but ethnically Hungarian, and thus adopts a strand of empathy for the new workers not shared by many others in town — why does belonging have to be defined by arbitrary factors, be it race, skin colour, ethnicity, or nationality? Meanwhile, Matthias is forever caught between worlds as a half German, half Romani “mongrel.” He is subjected to racist jokes and constant denigrating comments about the Romani nomads, but is also expected to join in whenever conversation turns to disparaging the Sri Lankans. “We got rid of the gypsies and now they’re breeding here?” asks his friend, who adds upon seeing Matthias’s uncomfortable expression, “No, but aren’t you mostly German?”
Mirroring every conflict based on hypocrisy and an excess of nationalistic idealism, Mungiu ensures that the Transylvanian xenophobes just about run the gamut on every possible stance they could take, from belief in pseudoscientific racism about how brown people are “dirtier” and “less hygienic,” to spouting oft-repeated Islamophobic platitudes (despite the Sri Lankan workers being Catholic). All this culminates in a remarkable 17-minute unbroken shot of a town meeting that will ultimately decide Mahinda and Alick’s fates. Boasting a cast of over 200 extras and masterful direction from Mungiu that ensures an atmosphere of controlled chaos, the scene emcompasses discourse on just about every touchpoint plaguing the European psyche today, from the class wage disparity and colonisation to outdated Ludditism and growing anger at the European Union’s political and financial impotence. Why is there EU funding for parks but not basic sewage? Why can’t Csilla offer higher wages to the impoverished locals, seeing as her fellow factory superintendent drives a Mercedes? Why does the Hungarian minority have a vice grip on the top tiers of the Transylvanian economy, while the Romanian majority have to move to other countries to find work?
There are no easy answers to these questions, and definitely no right answers either. Matthias, in all his ineffectuality and indecision, perfectly embodies this thanks to Mungiu’s disdain for conventional Western character arcs. Matthias does not learn anything over the course of the film — in fact, according to Mungiu’s responses at the Chicago International Film Festival’s post-screening Q&A, he is even more confused at the end than he was at the start. There is no great moral epiphany for him. Rather, he simply realises that inaction and neutrality, too, has its consequences. While it may initially feel like you’ve been left hanging, it is also really the only way one can end a film like this without resorting to oversimplification, or wagging a moralising, holier-than-thou finger at one’s viewers.
Clearly, no one knows this better than Mungiu, even if this is rooted in cynicism. “People don’t really have conversations,” he told his Q&A audience. “They have their conclusions before they even start talking.” Artistic, but not overly idealistic, Mungiu has no delusions of grandeur in which “R.M.N.” turns Europe into an open, accepting utopia. Rather, he is simply intent on dragging the continent’s ugliest anxieties out into the open and letting the chips fall where they may. And, on the verge of falling into cynicism myself, I do think that is the best a filmmaker can aim for. After all, the only thing worse than an unbeliever is an ardent believer who ultimately fails — and on the grounds of its creation, “R.M.N.” is most certainly a success.
